I. The Statutory Framework

The Atomic Energy Act of 1954, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 2011 et seq., established the federal government’s exclusive authority over the civilian use of nuclear energy.¹ Section 101 of the Act, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 2131, provides, in language that has not materially changed in seventy-two years: “It shall be unlawful, except as provided in section 2062 of this title, for any person within the United States to transfer or receive in interstate commerce, manufacture, produce, transfer, acquire, possess, use, import or export any utilization or production facility except under and in accordance with a license issued by the Commission pursuant to section 103 or 104 of this title.”²

The Commission’s regulations at 10 CFR § 50.2 define a “utilization facility” as “any nuclear reactor other than one designed or used primarily for the formation of plutonium or U-233.”³ The definition contains no exemption for reactors that formed naturally. No exemption exists for reactors whose designer is not a person. No exemption exists for reactors whose fuel is hydrogen, whose moderator is gravity, and whose containment structure is the star itself.

Under 10 CFR Parts 50 and 52, the licensing of a single commercial reactor requires a construction permit or combined license, a final safety analysis report, an environmental impact statement, a probabilistic risk assessment, public hearings, and an adjudicatory process that routinely spans years and generates tens of thousands of pages of technical documentation.⁴ The NRC currently regulates 95 licensed commercial reactors — 64 pressurized water reactors and 31 boiling water reactors — which generate about one-fifth of the nation’s electricity.⁵ Each of these facilities is licensed. Each is inspected. Each is insured. The sun is none of these things.

II. The Operator

The sun is a nuclear fusion reactor. This is not a metaphor, an analogy, or a figure of speech. In the sun’s core, at temperatures exceeding 15 million degrees Celsius, hydrogen nuclei fuse into helium through the proton-proton chain reaction: four protons are welded into a single helium-4 nucleus, and the helium weighs approximately 0.7 percent less than the four protons that went in.⁶ The missing mass leaves the reaction as gamma-ray photons and neutrinos, by the arithmetic of E=mc².

Every second, the sun fuses approximately 600 million metric tons of hydrogen into helium.⁷ Roughly 4 million metric tons of that mass — the difference between the ingredients and the product — vanishes outright, converted into pure energy. That is the mass of a small mountain, deleted from existence every tick of the clock, reappearing as light. The reactor’s sustained power output is approximately 3.8 × 10²⁶ watts.⁸

The operator has been in continuous operation for approximately 4.6 billion years and has enough hydrogen in its core to continue for roughly another five billion.⁹ It predates the Atomic Energy Act by approximately 4,599,999,946 years. It predates the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was created in 1974, by a margin that is difficult to express without scientific notation. The sun began operating before the United States existed, before the English language existed, and before multicellular life existed. It did not wait for a license. There was no one to issue one.

The fusion reaction also produces a continuous stream of ionizing byproducts. Approximately 65 billion solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth’s surface every second, day and night, passing through the planet, its buildings, its regulatory agencies, and every person within the United States.¹⁰ These particles are the exhaust of an unlicensed nuclear reaction, and they are, at this moment, passing through the reader.

III. The Scale of the Violation

The NRC’s ninety-five licensed reactors generate approximately 779 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, about 18.6 percent of American gross electricity generation.¹¹ The licensing, inspection, and insurance apparatus that governs this output is the most intensive regulatory regime ever constructed for a civilian industry. It exists because the fission of uranium is dangerous, and the law treats it accordingly.

The sun emits 3.8 × 10²⁶ joules every second. The licensed fleet’s entire annual electrical output — 779 billion kilowatt-hours, or 2.8 × 10¹⁸ joules — is matched by the sun in approximately seven nanoseconds.¹² In the time it takes light to travel seven feet, the unlicensed facility produces what the licensed industry produces in a year.

The sun’s thermal power exceeds the licensed fleet’s combined nameplate generating capacity by a factor of roughly four quadrillion.¹³ To put the ratio in regulatory terms: if the NRC’s reactor fleet is the regulated nuclear industry, the unlicensed industry is four quadrillion times larger, operates around the clock, has never submitted a license application, and cannot be shut down, throttled, or placed into a refueling outage by any order of the Commission.

IV. The Fusion Decision

The Commission has, in fact, considered the question of fusion. On April 13, 2023, all five NRC Commissioners voted unanimously to regulate fusion energy systems under the agency’s byproduct material framework at 10 CFR Part 30 — the same regime that governs particle accelerators — rather than under the utilization facility framework of 10 CFR Parts 50 and 52 that governs fission power reactors.¹⁴ The Commission directed its staff to undertake a limited-scope rulemaking, develop a new volume of licensing guidance, and work with the Agreement States, which would serve as the primary licensing authority for most commercial fusion machines.¹⁵

The decision was praised as regulatory foresight. It established, before a single commercial fusion machine had produced net energy, exactly how the largest conceivable fusion machines would be licensed. It was technology-neutral. It was risk-informed. It was, in the Commission’s own telling, a triumph of advance planning.

The largest fusion machine in the solar system was not consulted. It did not submit comments on the proposed framework. It did not apply for a Part 30 byproduct materials license. It did not apply for a Part 50 utilization facility license. It has not filed with any of the 39 Agreement States that have assumed NRC regulatory authority over radioactive materials.¹⁶ The Commission spent two years deciding how to license a fusion machine that does not yet exist. It has spent zero years licensing the fusion machine that powers the planet.

V. The Insurance Gap

The Price-Anderson Act, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 2210, requires every licensed commercial reactor to maintain two layers of financial protection against nuclear damage claims.¹⁷ The primary layer is $500 million in liability insurance per reactor site, provided by American Nuclear Insurers. The secondary layer is a retrospective premium program: if damages from a nuclear incident exceed the primary layer, every covered reactor in the country is assessed up to $158 million per reactor per incident. With 95 reactors currently covered, the two layers make approximately $15.5 billion available to compensate the public.¹⁸ The NRC’s regulations implementing the Act are at 10 CFR Part 140.¹⁹

The sun maintains no primary layer. It participates in no retrospective premium pool. It has no policy with American Nuclear Insurers. It has no indemnity agreement with the Commission. The largest nuclear facility in the solar system carries no financial protection whatsoever against the consequences of its operation, in a statutory framework whose entire premise is that no nuclear facility should operate without it.

The irony is structural. Price-Anderson exists because Congress determined that nuclear accidents could produce damages no private insurer would underwrite and no single operator could pay. The sun is the one nuclear operator whose worst credible accident — a severe geomagnetic storm, of the class discussed in Section VII — could plausibly produce damages in the trillions of dollars, a figure that would exhaust the entire $15.5 billion licensed-industry pool approximately 129 times over before reaching the National Academy of Sciences’ upper estimate of $2 trillion.²⁰ The operator best positioned to need the insurance is the one operator the insurance was never extended to.

VI. The Inspection Gap

The NRC’s Reactor Oversight Process subjects every licensed reactor to continuous regulatory scrutiny. In fiscal year 2024, the Commission logged approximately 5,960 inspection and assessment hours at each operating reactor.²¹ Resident inspectors are stationed at every site. Performance indicators are tracked. Findings are color-coded. A licensed reactor is, in a meaningful sense, the most watched machine in American industry.

The sun has received zero inspection hours. No resident inspector has ever been stationed at the facility. No performance indicators are tracked. No findings have been issued, not because none exist, but because the inspection program has never visited. The inspection-to-facility ratio for the licensed fleet is approximately 5,960 hours per reactor per year. The inspection-to-facility ratio for the sun is zero.

The practical obstacles are real. The facility’s surface temperature is approximately 5,500 degrees Celsius. An inspector dispatched to the site would not survive the journey. But the Commission inspects facilities it cannot enter by other means — remote monitoring, licensee self-reporting, probabilistic risk assessment — and it has applied none of these to the sun. The operator files no reports. It performs no self-assessments. It does not know the Commission exists.

VII. The Accident History

On the morning of September 1, 1859, the English astronomer Richard Carrington observed two brilliant beads of white light appear over a group of sunspots, intensify, and fade within five minutes — the first recorded solar flare.²² The following morning, skies across the planet erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read by their light, with auroras visible at near-tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.²³

Telegraph systems — the high technology of the day — went haywire worldwide. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set telegraph paper on fire. When telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering their lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted, powered by the storm itself.²⁴ The facility had, in regulatory terms, experienced an unplanned release of ionizing radiation with offsite consequences, including fires, personnel shocks, and the disruption of critical communications infrastructure across two continents.

Under 10 CFR § 50.72, a licensed reactor must notify the NRC Operations Center promptly of events meeting specified reporting criteria, and under 10 CFR § 50.73, it must file a written licensee event report analyzing the root cause.²⁵ No notification was filed for the Carrington Event. No licensee event report was submitted. No root-cause analysis was performed. No corrective actions were identified. The operator’s sole accident in 4.6 billion years of operation — an accident that set communications equipment on fire across the Northern Hemisphere — generated zero pages of regulatory paperwork.

The near-misses are equally undocumented. On July 23, 2012, the sun hurled a Carrington-class coronal mass ejection into space on a trajectory that missed the Earth. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” said Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado, summarizing the event at a NOAA workshop.²⁶ A National Academy of Sciences study estimated that a direct hit could cause up to $2 trillion in initial damages and require four to ten years for recovery.²⁷ The operator did not report the near-miss to the NRC Operations Center. It did not file a preliminary notification. It did not convene an incident investigation team. The event that came closest to ending the modern electrical grid was, from the regulator’s perspective, indistinguishable from a quiet day.

VIII. The Jurisdictional Void

Section 101 of the Atomic Energy Act applies to “any person within the United States.” The sun is not a person, and it is not within the United States. It is the definitional escape hatch, and this investigation discloses it plainly, as the genre requires: the statute was written for licensees with mailing addresses, and the sun has none.

But the escape hatch does not close the case so much as relocate it. The Commission’s authority over byproduct material extends, through the Agreement State program, to 39 states that have assumed regulatory responsibility for radioactive materials within their borders.²⁸ The sun sits in none of them. No state radiation control program has asserted jurisdiction over the solar system. The NRC’s enforcement regulations contemplate action against non-licensees who engage in deliberate misconduct, but the mechanism assumes a respondent who can be served, fined, and, if necessary, debarred. The sun cannot be served. A civil penalty assessed against it would be uncollectible. A debarment order would be a document describing the absence of the sun from the nuclear industry, which is the one place the sun is not absent from.

The Federal Aviation Administration, meanwhile, has quietly acknowledged the operator’s existence in a way the NRC has not. FAA Advisory Circular 120-61A provides guidance to air carriers on in-flight radiation exposure, including solar particle events — increases in ionizing radiation from the sun that penetrate the atmosphere and expose flight crews.²⁹ The FAA’s 2026 technical report notes that air carrier crewmembers, while not classified as radiation workers, are occupationally exposed to ionizing radiation, with the sun contributing significantly on occasion.³⁰ One federal agency trains workers on the radiation. Another federal agency licenses the reactors. Neither has asked the source for a license.

IX. The Regulatory Paradox

The paradox is now complete. The federal government regulates every gram of uranium in the country, licenses every commercial reactor down to the research reactors at universities, and spent two years deciding how to license fusion machines that have not yet been built. The one fusion machine that built the planet operates without a license, without insurance, without inspection, and without a single filed report in 4.6 billion years.

The government is, moreover, the operator’s largest customer. The sun is the ultimate source of every watt of solar electricity generated in the United States, an industry the federal government subsidizes through the investment tax credit at 26 U.S.C. § 48.³¹ The Treasury pays Americans to harvest energy from an unlicensed nuclear facility. The NRC licenses the fission alternative. The FAA warns the flight crews. The sun fuses six hundred million tons of hydrogen per second and files nothing.

The human who builds a fusion machine must obtain a license. The star whose fusion the machine imitates does not. The human’s machine is subject to inspection. The star’s is not. The human’s machine is limited to the design and location specified in its license. The star operates wherever it pleases, which is everywhere. The government is simultaneously the promoter of fusion energy, the regulator of fusion machines, and the silent beneficiary of the largest unregulated fusion operation in the solar system. The cognitive dissonance is thermonuclear.

X. The Enforcement Impossibility

The Commission’s civil penalty authority, as adjusted for inflation for fiscal year 2025, permits a maximum penalty of $372,240 per violation, per day, for violations of the Atomic Energy Act.³² Applied to a facility that has operated without a license for approximately 4.6 billion years, each day of operation constituting a separate continuing violation, the aggregate penalty exposure is approximately $625 quadrillion — a figure that exceeds the gross domestic product of every nation on Earth, combined, by a factor of roughly six million.

The penalty would be assessed against a respondent with no known assets, no bank accounts, and no capacity to execute a payment instrument. It would be the largest civil penalty in the history of federal enforcement and the least collectible, simultaneously. The Commission could revoke the facility’s license, except that no license was ever issued. It could order the facility to cease operation, except that the facility’s operation is the reason the Commission’s staff can read the order.

Decommissioning presents the final impossibility. Under 10 CFR § 50.75, every licensed reactor must provide reasonable assurance that funds will be available to decommission the facility at the end of its operating life.³³ The sun has established no decommissioning trust fund. Its planned shutdown — the red giant phase, in approximately five billion years — has no NRC-approved decommissioning plan, no selected decommissioning option, no cost estimate, and no schedule. The largest nuclear facility in the solar system will be decommissioned without a single regulatory filing, in an event that will consume the Earth, the Commission’s headquarters, and the filing cabinets in which the absence of the plan is documented.

The problem is not that the law lacks scope. The Atomic Energy Act covers utilization and production facilities. The regulations define them. The licensing framework is comprehensive. The inspection program is rigorous. The insurance regime is mandatory. The statutes reach every conceivable nuclear scenario that a 1954 Congress could have imagined. The scenario it did not imagine was one in which the reactor cannot read, cannot be served with process, and communicates primarily by fusing six hundred million tons of hydrogen per second.

The NRC licenses ninety-five reactors. The sun is one. The ratio of regulated reactors to unregulated fusion reactors in the solar system is ninety-five to one, and the one outproduces the ninety-five by a factor of four quadrillion. The ratio of inspection hours is 5,960 per reactor per year to zero. The ratio of licenses is ninety-five to zero. The ratio of decommissioning trust funds is ninety-five to zero. The ratio of event reports filed for the Carrington Event is zero.

The most prolific nuclear operator in the solar system is a G-type main-sequence star with a core temperature of fifteen million degrees, a work ethic that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has never matched, and a compliance record that consists entirely of the absence of paperwork. It has been in continuous operation for approximately 4.6 billion years. It has never received a license, a permit, a certificate of compliance, or a letter of no objection from any regulatory body in any jurisdiction on Earth or elsewhere.

The federal nuclear regulatory apparatus was built to govern human reactors. The reactor it does not govern is four quadrillion times larger, operates around the clock, cannot be shut down by any order of the Commission, and is, by the federal government’s own scientific assessments, the source of all the energy the licensed industry will ever produce a meaningful fraction of.

Ergo.