I dispute that. I'm as pro-nuclear as one can be, but I don't think the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is doing a bad job, or that the regulations are unreasonable. In the end, a lot of the regulations came as a response to incidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and others less well known. One way or another, nuclear reactors are extremely complex machines, with numerous failure modes. As various failure modes were learned (either the soft or the hard way), the regulations were updated. For example, after Fukushima, the NRC asked all the nuclear power plants in the US to undergo changes to make them more resilient to earthquakes.
This does not mean the economics of nuclear power is an unsolvable problem. It is an engineering problem, and it is very solvable. But it can't be solved if one does not try. No problem in this world can be solved if everyone is convinced it's unsolvable and nobody is willing to try to solve it.
Who is then supposed to solve this problem. It's an extremely capital intensive problem. A guy like Musk could do it, but Musk himself is uninterested in nuclear power (he likes to tell the fairly lame joke that we have a giant fusion reactor in the sky). Bill Gates has invested a lot of his money into nuclear power R&D, and this is good. But what Gates did not invest is his drive. Musk showed us that an extremely driven and competent manager can lower production costs by factors of 10 or 50. But just pouring money at a problem does not solve it, see Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin.
Fortunately, governments have much deeper pockets than even Gates, Bezos or Musk. China is a leader in this area, and Russia is very advanced too. It looks like the US Government finally got the message, so there is a pretty good chance to see real progress on this front in the next 10 years.
> ...I don't think the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is doing a bad job...
"He has a master's from Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies from Valparaiso University."
He's one of the better ones as he isn't actively trying to block new reactors going up. There are some gems on the other Chairperson wiki pages like "called for a global ban on nuclear power" (Gregory Jaczko if you want to look it up).
That is understood. The comment had a well written article that goes into detail about how the poorly designed regulations more than double the costs of building nuclear. Just saying you dispute something, without providing any arguments, or rebuttals is not very convincing.
I provided arguments: a lot of the regulations came in response to new failure rates discovered when operating nuclear reactors, many times via an accident like Fukushima.
But since you are asking, here's a typical statement from the linked article:
> Nuclear grade components don’t necessarily have higher performance requirements than conventional components - the cost instead mostly comes from the documentation and testing to ensure they’ll meet their performance requirements.
This seems like an example of "bad regulation". But it's not, it's actually good regulation. If you have 2 components with the same level of performance, and one has more strict documentation and testing, it does not mean they are interchangeable. The one with more testing is much less likely to fail, and this is quite important for a nuclear reactor. Would you dispose with this regulation?
Now consider this: the NRC approved the NuScale reactor design [1]. Yet, NuScale never built a demonstration reactor, the entire approval was based on computer models. A regulatory body hell-bent to stymie new reactors would not have done that. This approval, in my mind, shows that the NRC is quite reasonable.
And by the way, I did spend some time going over some of the approval documents. I remember a dissension paper that I found, where one NRC inspector expressed dissatisfaction with some corner case concerning borated water. I can't find it now, but I found some paragraphs in one of the final documents, where the NRC describes the situation ([2] page 48):
> The applicant also analyzed postulated scenarios involving extended DHRS operation with the secondary side water level in the steam generator tubes above the primary side water level in the reactor vessel downcomer, hereafter referred to as the boiling/condensing heat transfer mode. In this scenario, the boiling of borated primary coolant in the reactor core generates steam, which subsequently condenses on the section of the steam generator tubes that is filled with secondary coolant and above the downcomer water level. The resulting formation of condensate, if left unmitigated, would tend to dilute the boron concentration of the coolant in the downcomer.
The document then goes on to show that NuScale performed some analysis that eventually satisfied the NRC.
NuScale spent a lot of money and man-hours (if I remember correctly $0.5 BN and 1.5 million man-hours) in order to secure the approval. But reading the approval documents on the NRC website, you get the idea that all the work was actually needed. Reactors are just very complex machines with many failure modes.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...