> The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators.
> [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter.
No capital project would ever break ground with these conditions in place. Who would invest billions of dollars in something that could be made illegal any day with no recourse? I'm surprised that any new nuclear power plants were built at all.
That's why most great innovations happen during or just after wars. Bureaucracy stifles everything. It would be nice if we could fix this without having a war.
You'd think "increasingly-inevitable catastrophic destruction of Earth's biosphere" would count as a "war", given the projected casualty counts potentially dwarfing all wars combined.
They were only built with massive subsidies or through legal means being able to shift the costs to the ratepayers like the now cancelled Virgil C. Summer.
I'd much rather we be spending massive subsidies on nuclear power (and space exploration, and science in general) than on an increasingly-bloated military-industrial complex.
When did the NRC ever relax, cancel, or not enforce regulations on the nuclear industry?
[*edit] if you’re downvoting, could you please provide an example. I’m pretty well read on this and have never encountered any regulatory loosening by the NRC.
and I also suppose that the contracts with private corporations are such, that they don't just lose their money if regulation changes. Although, again, I'm a lay person when it comes to the US energy sector.
Totally fair. I think the issue has been that the various parts of the US government have been working at cross purposes with respect to nuclear power.
> and I also suppose that the contracts with private corporations are such, that they don't just lose their money if regulation changes.
The way the NRC works, they can without notice change the rules in a way that will force you to redesign a plant that is under construction. If you're too far along you'll just have to scrap the whole thing. If you look at this list of closed or abandoned nuclear projects, 4 are explicitly due to NRC changes[1]. This doesn't include any cancelled plans that hadn't begun construction and isn't a complete list. If coal power were regulated the way nuclear was, there would be no coal power in the US. Coal plants release 2 orders of magnitude more radiation per kwh than nuclear in the US and in a form that is more dangerous, e.g. coal ash which goes deep into your lungs[2].
There could bwhate similarity with what aeroplane manufacturers have to do. The Max 8 was declared illegal overnight. And new planes cost tens of billions to develop.
Literally everyone who builds anything ever does so under the condition that it could be made illegal any day with no recourse. That's the normal state of affairs.
Hah - I suppose by that standard all organization are criminal organizations (because someone who works in them commits crimes). I suppose they are all drug smugglers as well (as doubtless some of their employees use drugs). Someone should tell the DEA.
I think a more useful model is to look at what "the organization" does (as opposed to the people who work for it). For instance, Enron's business strategy relied on breaking the law. PG&E has been unable (or unwilling) to maintain its infrastructure to a level where it is safe to operate year round. These things existed outside of any individual crimes committed by employees (and it is useful to differentiate between individuals who are committing crimes in service of organization goals v.s. only for private benefit).
It doesn't matter who is footing the bill. It is crazy for any entity to invest any money under those circumstances.
The solution to one chunk of the government running mad and then handing lots of money to some other chunk of the government to try to chase after them would... uh... probably produce a world fairly similar to what we live in, actually. Which isn't a solution.
Regardless, constantly changing the goal posts with no significant costs to the ones doing the changing is a problem for any funding mechanism.
This line of reasoning makes no sense to me. If the government was better at building things than "profiteers," why shouldn't we just have the government build everything? Why shouldn't the government make cell phones and iPads? Why does Silicon Valley even exist?
In fact, we tried your proposal at scale. Nearly every developed country privatized electricity generation in the 1980s. Many countries, like India, still have state-owned power companies. If they were better, we would know.
Germany was at 40% renewables last year, and its electric generation sector is private. The UK—which privatized its electric generation under Thatcher back in the 1980s—was at 43%. China was at 29%.
The point is that neither of those is happening because the plants are not being built at all.
They are footing an entirely different kind of bill instead, paid with an entirely different kind of currency.
Instead of paying for a nuclear plant, regardless by what mechanism, they are living with continued use of coal and gas, or simply not enough capacity to meet the upcoming needs of things like wider adoption of EVs.
No single entity solves anything. There is no such thing as an unbiased decision maker. Competing interests must always have to deal with each other and answer for whatever they do.
Here we've had an entity with no consequences and it's had a negative outcome. It doesn't matter that it was a government or a private entity. Examples of both abound.
> [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter.
No capital project would ever break ground with these conditions in place. Who would invest billions of dollars in something that could be made illegal any day with no recourse? I'm surprised that any new nuclear power plants were built at all.