The existing regulatory structure for nuclear power was designed for the previous generation of reactors. I don’t have deep knowledge in this area, but it’s clear to me that more modern designs have very different risk profiles, and the regulatory structure should change to reflect that. This should reduce the compliance cost, which is a very large portion of the initial and operational costs of nuclear power.
In short - nukes are expensive now because they’re an extremely regulated industry. New designs are much safer and new regulation for them should therefore have much lower compliance costs.
It's not just that "The existing regulatory structure for nuclear power was designed for the previous generation of reactors."
It was designed specifically to bankrupt them. It was designed to make them unprofitable.
Just changing an ordinary light bulb in a nuclear power plant is all sorts of certification and paperwork.
There was a ratchet effect on regulations. You could always add more, but nobody would take responsibility for removing regulations. The existence of regulations makes the reactors seem even more terrifying (because why else need the regulations) and then the resulting terror was used to justify more regulations.
That's not quite why rigorous regulations were put in place.
There have been thousands of tanker oil spills, 3,000,000 gallons of oil spilled from US pipelines each year, hundreds of coal-ash spills...
In that context, Nuclear wasn't over-regulated, other power sources are severely, dangerously under-regulated. The excellent safety record of Nuclear points towards the regulations being rather effective.
I will grant that those regulations are out-dated. Reactors designs are different now, and probably need to be streamlined. But rigorous regulations regarding multiple redundancies, safety checks, emergency drills, meticulous documentation of all practices & procedures performed... these things shouldn't go away.
>That's not quite why rigorous regulations were put in place.
Yes it is. Greenpeace and the like paraded Chernobyl and three mile island around and because it was the 70s and 80s and pollution was a big problem politicians tripped over each other to be seen Doing Something (TM) and that's more or less how we got the current regulatory environment. Of course their intentions were good but it's perfectly possible to both have good intentions and be wrong.
No, really, it isn't. Part of the picture? Sure. But here is literally the history of nuclear regulation [0]
You'll find a tremendous amount of regulation occured long before that time. And yes, in the wake of Chernobyl and our near miss at 3 Mile Island, things were tightened up more, but the lack of new plants was as much about negative public perception than anything else, including very strong coal and gas lobbies that had a vested interest in keeping nuclear energy's market share as low as possible. In the face of multi billion dollar entrenched interests, you over estimate the impact of small non profits. If you really think the industry is over regulated, blame those entrenched interests, not some vocal minority and NIMBY folks.
You also failed to address the point about the excellent safety record of a well-regulated nuclear industry compared to the awful record of significantly less regulated power sources.
Even if you are right about the high cost of regulations, what has that achieved? It has achieved a product that actually prices in the true cost, unlike all of these slipshod practices with oil or coal, where the cost of their incredibly awful safety records is passed indirectly on to everyone. So even if you're right, you've simply described the correct way things should work: potentially unsafe products should have a lot of upfront costs to ensure safety. If we all had to pay for the full environmental impacts of such choices up front, we'd be hammering down the doors of nuclear power to get plants built because, done right, it is safer and cheaper than pricing those same consequences into coal and oil.
The existing regulatory structure was designed specifically to stop nuclear power plants from doing things like running all the sets of redundant control and monitoring wiring through a single narrow space, filling that wiring space with flammable foam, and then testing the foam for air leaks with a candle when the plant was in operation. (This is not a hypothetical example - it actually happened in the US during the golden era of nuclear power, indeed I think it may have even been standard practice across multiple plants, and it very nearly caused a serious accident when the inevitable happened.)
I know the Trump administration has tinkered with adding more flexibility to the regulations covering fire protection and safety in nuclear plants in order to try and encourage more economical new nuclear power plants with modernized designs, but it hasn't really helped because the tradeoff for being able to deviate from the rigid rules is that the companies building them have to do a bunch of work to show that their new designs achieve the same safety goals.
> I don’t have deep knowledge in this area, but it’s clear to me that more modern designs have very different risk profiles
There are lots of claims of that, but many of those claims sound exactly the same as the ones made about he "safe Japanese nuclear industry" prior to Fukushima.
Here's a take by someone who actually has very deep knowledge on the subject:
>I oversaw the U.S. nuclear power industry. Now I think it should be banned. The danger from climate change no longer outweighs the risks of nuclear accident
That sounds like an indictment of the commercial industry and deep corruption of US regulatory bodies. Its not an indictment of nuclear itself. The new designs are fundamentally safer, but i can see the value in the aegument that its not worth trying in as risky and corrupted a regulatory environment as the United States without significant political change first.
It's the exact opposite of your claim. In it he points out how the regulator actively worked to enable the nuclear industry in the US.
It's also worth nothing that this didn't appear to be corruption by any conventional definition. It seems more like the regulators believed that nuclear power was beneficial and acted based on that belief rather than a particular commercial motive.
In short - nukes are expensive now because they’re an extremely regulated industry. New designs are much safer and new regulation for them should therefore have much lower compliance costs.