Representative Collins had a problem. He'd shown up to his first meeting of Delaware's Nuclear Energy Feasibility Task Force on January 6th, sat through hours of presentations on uranium mine leaching, thermal pollution, radioactive waste, and emergency evacuation zones — and he'd heard enough.
"My concern is none of the, what we talked about today was about SMRs," Collins told the room during public comment. "And furthermore by starting with so many negative topics, the mindset of being created that oh, we can never do this, let's get some positive in there so at least it could be fairly evaluated. I'm not talking about rubber stamp, I'm talking about a fair evaluation to see if it would be a benefit to the citizens of Delaware."
It was the most candid moment of a long morning — and it crystallized a tension that will follow this task force for months: Is Delaware genuinely open to nuclear power, or has the framing already tilted the scales?
The Room Where It Happens
The Delaware Nuclear Energy Feasibility Task Force was convened to answer a deceptively simple question: Should Delaware site a small modular reactor? With 19 of its 25 members present and quorum confirmed, the group spent the January 6th session wading through Module 1 — environmental benefits and potential risks — with a roster of expert presenters and a packed agenda that ran well past schedule.
Senator Stephanie Hansen, chair of the Senate Energy Committee and the task force's presiding officer, set the tone early: methodical, exhaustive, and emphatically unhurried. When task force member Martin Willis pressed her on whether nuclear-promoting legislation could reach the General Assembly floor before the 153rd session ends on June 30, Hansen was direct.
"Trying to rush something that's incomplete or partial is detrimental as opposed to finishing our work," she said. She added that any individual legislator remained free to introduce nuclear legislation independently — but that was separate from the task force's mission.
The final report is due July 30. The next General Assembly doesn't convene until January 2027. For nuclear advocates in the room, that math felt frustrating.
Dr. Clemons Drops the Waste Bombshell
If Collins felt the day skewed negative, Dr. Jennifer Clemons gave him reason to worry. An associate professor in Penn State's Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering and a 2024 recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy's C3E Education Award, Clemons was the session's most technically dense presenter — and her findings on small modular reactors cut against one of the technology's central selling points.
"Small modular reactors actually produce more waste in terms of megawatts or megawatt hours, however you want to do that," she told the task force. "And I was surprised to see it's up to two to 30 times more waste per megawatt."
That figure — drawn from published research — directly challenges the argument that SMRs represent a cleaner, more manageable alternative to large reactors. Clemons also noted that U.S. high-level nuclear waste totals approximately 2,000 metric tons per year, stored across roughly 30 states, with no federal repository in operation.
She went further, raising the uranium supply chain as a geopolitical vulnerability. Imports from Russia and Kazakhstan supply a meaningful share of domestic nuclear fuel. In 2024, according to Clemons, there were only 304 full-time equivalent workers in U.S. uranium mining — a figure she attributed to weak domestic demand since Fukushima rather than a shortage of in-ground supply. Task force member Andrew Cotone noted that the Department of Energy had announced $2.7 billion for three companies to expand domestic uranium mining — an announcement made the day before the meeting.
On the water side, Clemons cited a meta-analysis of 853 articles finding a 4.3-degree average temperature increase in water bodies near nuclear plants, raising concerns about reduced oxygen levels, disrupted reproductive cycles, and algae blooms. Robert Denight, Vice President of Nuclear Engineering at PSEG, offered context: Hope Creek's cooling tower draws approximately 20,000 gallons per minute of brackish water from the Delaware River for makeup flow, while the Salem units draw roughly 1 million gallons per minute in a once-through cooling configuration.
The Man From PSEG Makes His Case
If Clemons represented the cautionary voice, Denight was the counterweight — and he arrived with data.
Denight, a Middletown, Delaware resident who oversees nuclear engineering for PSEG's Salem and Hope Creek generating stations, walked the task force through radiation dose comparisons that he argued reframe public anxiety about nuclear power. The average person, he said, receives about 300 millirem per year from background radiation. Three Mile Island's 1979 accident released an estimated 1.4 millirem to the public. The average coal plant, he noted, emits 1.9 millirem. Fukushima's estimated public dose was approximately 1 REM — or 1,000 millirem. Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, produced public dose rates of roughly 10 REM; Denight explained that Chernobyl's severity was largely attributable to the absence of a containment structure in the Soviet reactor design.
On waste volume, Denight offered a striking analogy that reframed the scale of the problem.
"If you took all the dry casts currently in the country, offloaded all the fuel, put it in a dry cast, put it all into a single area, it would be about the size of a football field, about three stories tall," he said. "So that's all the nuclear fuel that we've ever used since the 1970s, just to put that in perspective."
Denight was careful to avoid triumphalism. He described himself as "an all of the above type person" who does not view nuclear as a "panacea solution," but argued that a carbon-free future for Delaware essentially requires it as part of the mix. His remaining approximately 10 slides — covering what it would actually take to build a nuclear power plant in Delaware — were deferred to the January 26th meeting.
Hope Creek and Salem currently store about 90 dry casks of spent fuel on-site, with another five to six scheduled to be loaded in the coming month.
The Emergency Manager Who's Already Ready
Before Clemons and Denight took the floor, AJ Shaw — Delaware's emergency manager — offered a presentation that may have been the session's most practically consequential.
Shaw's message was quietly reassuring: Delaware already has a radiological emergency preparedness program, and it's been running for years. The state maintains memoranda of understanding with four nuclear power plants within its 50-mile ingestion planning zone, conducts biennial full-activation exercises with no major findings in the last five years, and distributes potassium iodide to residents within the 10-mile planning zone multiple times annually. According to a 2023 study, approximately 160,000 to 170,000 people live within the Salem/Hope Creek emergency planning zone at peak population.
Representative Lambert pressed Shaw on whether proximity to residential communities should be a top priority for any SMR siting decision. Shaw agreed — but with a caveat that landed with some weight: the population in the 10-mile planning zone around the existing MOT area "hasn't slowed down" in recent years, and "there's nothing we can do about that" for a plant built 40 years ago. For a new facility, however, he said proximity should absolutely be among the highest considerations.
Representative Burns raised groundwater and hydrogeology concerns, asking specifically about contamination pathways for SMRs. Shaw acknowledged the complexity but emphasized that state agencies already possess the core expertise; scaling up for an in-state facility would require assessment, not a ground-up build.
Shaw also flagged an important nuance about SMR emergency planning: new SMR designs are currently advertised as requiring emergency planning zones only to the fence line — a dramatic reduction from the 10-mile zones that govern existing large plants. But that designation hinges on finalized reactor designs and completed accident analyses, neither of which exist yet for domestic commercial SMRs.
A Fight Over a Government Office No One Wants to Pay For
One of the session's more procedural-seeming debates turned into a genuine philosophical argument. The question: Should Delaware pursue designation as an NRC Agreement State — a status that would give it authority to license and inspect certain nuclear materials within its borders?
Kathryn Lienhard, Energy Research Associate with Delaware Sea Grant, presented the background: 40 states already hold Agreement State status; Delaware is the only state in NRC Region 1 that does not; Connecticut became the most recent designee in 2025 after beginning the process in 2020; and the average designation process takes approximately four years.
Martin Willis argued the designation was worth pursuing even without a nuclear plant, noting that Oregon, Nevada, Wyoming, and Rhode Island are all Agreement States without nuclear power plants, and that Connecticut projects roughly $1.7 million in annual revenue now flowing to the state instead of the NRC.
Robert Book was skeptical. Without a nuclear plant generating licensing fees, he asked, who exactly would pay to staff Delaware's regulatory apparatus? The designation, he said, was "an opportunity to create another department of state government that maybe we don't need."
Wayne Vogel went further, arguing he saw "no tie-in" between Agreement State designation and actually siting an SMR in Delaware — pointing out that Pennsylvania operated multiple large nuclear plants for years without holding Agreement State status.
Denight offered what he called the "punchline": Delaware would not need to be an Agreement State to move forward on building a nuclear power plant. The NRC retains authority over commercial reactors regardless. Senator Hansen said she would contact a relevant NRC official about the program and potentially invite them to a future meeting — a characteristically deliberate non-commitment.
Collins Objects, Richardson Pushes Back
Collins's public comment near the end of the session touched something real. His argument — that beginning Module 1 with uranium mining hazards, thermal pollution, and waste concerns created a biased frame — is a version of a fight playing out in legislatures across the country as nuclear's political fortunes have shifted.
Senator Richardson responded that he didn't see an emphasis on negativity and that "everyone's mind is open to the fact that SMRs might be good for Delaware," suggesting Collins may be over-emphasizing the concern. The presiding officer noted that the task force's governing resolution explicitly structures the five modules around five separate topic areas, and Module 1 covers environmental benefits and potential risks — both sides.
Collins also argued that SMRs "are designed in a way they basically can't melt down" and cited nuclear-powered naval vessels in Norfolk as a safety precedent. Denight's presentation would have offered him some support on the safety data — though Clemons's waste figures complicated any simple argument that SMRs are straightforwardly cleaner.
No formal change to the agenda resulted from Collins's objection. The task force voted — by voice vote, with no opposition recorded — to adopt the proposed meeting schedule running through July, with a final report due July 30.
What the Task Force Adopted — And What It Deferred
The meeting's one formal vote was procedural: the task force unanimously approved its schedule of biweekly Monday meetings, generally running 9 a.m. to noon, with modules roughly tracking calendar months — Module 1 in January through Module 5 in May, followed by recommendations and the final report.
Task force member Andrew Cotone, presenting virtually, circulated concept and research papers he had compiled as starting points for each module's discussion. One unnamed member described them as "very straightforward, very informative, full of facts, references." Cotone said simply: "I wanted to take a stake in the ground as a starting point for discussion. And there's no pride of authorship."
The task force also confirmed a January 15th meeting at the Sustainable Energy Utility with Dr. Webler, Senator Hansen, Kathy Lynehan, and Tom Noy to explore whether the SEU might fund a systems-approach analysis of Delaware's nuclear options.
A technical issue had delayed public availability of the task force's December 22nd interim report by more than 10 days — a problem Hansen said was not intentional but "certainly was not acceptable."
What Happens Next — And Why It Matters
The January 26th meeting carries a loaded agenda: Denight returns to present his remaining slides on what building a nuclear plant in Delaware would actually require; a local expert identified in task force notes as a nuclear waste disposal specialist is scheduled to present; and Reliability First — the grid oversight organization — will answer Delaware-specific questions about nuclear power's role in regional grid reliability, questions modeled on a similar analysis conducted for New Jersey.
The stakes of this task force's eventual recommendations are difficult to overstate. Delaware gets more than about two-thirds of its electricity from out-of-state sources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, making it one of the most electricity-import-dependent states in the nation. SMRs — still unproven at commercial scale in the United States — have been proposed as a potential path toward both energy independence and decarbonization.
If the task force ultimately recommends pursuing an SMR and the General Assembly acts on that recommendation, Delaware would join a small group of states actively working to site first-of-kind commercial reactors — with all the regulatory complexity, public opposition, and decade-long construction timelines that entails. If the task force recommends against it, or if its final report lands with a divided, hedge-everything conclusion, Delaware's grid will remain dependent on imports from plants it doesn't regulate, can't control, and already has emergency plans for.
For the 160,000 to 170,000 Delawareans already living inside the Salem/Hope Creek emergency planning zone, that's not an abstract question. It's the sound of a quarterly siren test at 11 a.m. — on a Tuesday in January, while the task force was still in session.