>Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany
Dr. Bernard Laponche, former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety
A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former chair of the NRC (not Jaczko). The reactor people said their main problem was that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at a design. Getting to that point took several hundred million dollars. Then the NRC would give a flat yes or no. If no then you were out of business.
That's a pretty difficult environment for investors. The reactor people said just breaking the process into phases would be a huge help. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and was uninterested in climate change.
So if I want to build a house I have to come to the building authority with blueprints and ask if that building design is OK. I can't just ask step by step: is it OK if I use these walls, these windows... And build up my house like that.
Why would that be different for a nuclear regulatory body? Moreover, they are designing new reactor technology much more complex and less understood than a house. I imagine for safety assessments one would need to look at the whole design, just look at the example on cable trunks given in the article.
I wonder what the startups would say if the agency would approve their first steps, but then disapprove the full blueprints, because even though the steps made sense the whole does not meet requirements. Or do they want guarantees?
I think all they want is to use modern, iterative development principles. It's fine to have the final 'yes' take the full lump sum and a 'no' being a real possibility. What they want is to be able to get multiple opportunities to fail and get a 'no' earlier in the process, when the stakes are smaller.
While your building analogy is nice, I'll propose a different one - pharmaceutical companies face a similar, lengthy, expensive regulatory process, but a new treatment doesn't just go from a single prototype to human trials - there are many steps, costing more and more as you get closer to certification, and each can block the entire thing. We need a similar path for new nuclear designs if we want to be able to live on this planet for long.
It would be nice if, say, ten million dollars into the process of preparing blueprints, the agency could look over the prints and the plans for the remaining prints and say "yes it looks like you're on the right track, make sure the reactor wall you decide on isn't too heavy for those struts." In a much more precise way that probably costs a million bucks, of course.
Regulatory intervention could happen at any point in the process. You could imagine an even worse world where the first inspection is after the plant is built, and changes are typically requested to the high level design.
NRC's services don't necessarily need to be free. But they should be reasonable, both in fees, and in the process. They are a service run by government.
being in service of the public good is not offering a service. Their job is to regulate industry, not offer it a service.
If you want a service you hire someone to fulfill it. The US government created the 'service' but not for industry, but for the regulation of industry. The 'service' isn't offered to industry for the good of industry. It's the opposite of a normal understanding of service.
If you are regulated have no choice whether to take the service or not, and your say in their 'services' is extremely limited.
Calling it a service is an activity in intentionally misleading what an organization like the NCR does. They are not a service. They are a regulator.
You are intentionally conflating two disparate definitions of service ('they offer a service' vs 'they are in the service of') and really for no gain except to come up with your own mandate for an NCR that already has one, and doesn't care about your opinion because they receive their mandate from government and not from you and your intentionally misleading arguments.
At home, I have a water pressure regulator. It came welded shut by the manufacturer because, no water flowing at all means no risk of overpressure at all.
Regulation doesn't means only hindering the industry, but accompanying its development safely through overseeing.
I think the point is a valid one. Not all nuclear regulators are as blinkered as the NRC. Canada, for example, has a very effective regulatory regime, while being much friendlier to new technology. Terrestrial Energy, a molten salt reactor company in Canada, is making good progress and has spoken highly of their regulators. But I don't think anyone would say that Canada makes unsafe reactors.
It seems strange to me that they'd want that rather than finding out up-front before they spent a much greater amount of money actually building something which might be rejected.
The issue is that the NRC requires this process even for subsequent versions of the same design. That's just nonsense, if it's a copy of an approved design this process is unnecessary.
Requiring blueprints would seem critical to actually being able to have a product to review for safety. Not only blueprints, but detailed material specs as well.
Nobody was asking for complete approval without blueprints. They just wanted an early indication along the lines of "sure, you're on the right track" or "don't waste your time, no way in hell we're approving anything like that." Or maybe "that sorta works but we would require X and Y," and then they could incorporate that into the design.
I'm not sure how a statement describing nuclear power as "too costly... too costly and risky... unsustainable... financially unsustainable... militarily hazardous... inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents... subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems... [and] too unwieldy and complex" can be construed as anything other than opposition to nuclear power.
They can be construed as opposition to tax payer founded nuclear power which technically is so something else then nuclear power. One is a policy the other a technology.
>A report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General Hubert T. Bell accused Jaczko of "strategically" withholding information from his colleagues in an effort to keep plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from advancing.
>In October 2011, all the other four NRC commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—sent a letter to the White House expressing "grave concern" about Jaczko's actions at the NRC. On December 14, 2011, Commissioner William Ostendorff, a Republican, told a House oversight committee that Jaczko's "bullying and intimidation... should not and cannot be tolerated."
https://www.powermag.com/blog/former-nuclear-leaders-say-no-...
>Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany Dr. Bernard Laponche, former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety