There should be pretty strict regulation for fission reactor development, simply because radioactive materials in runaway reactions can have totally uncontrolla

There should be pretty strict regulation for fission reactor development, simply because radioactive materials in runaway reactions can have totally uncontrollable, millennia-spanning consequences. Very few other technologies have this potential - even a regular chemical explosion poses little risk to future generations in a large radius. Certain materials (plutonium, for instance) can reach criticality very quickly and in tiny quantities, and plutonium is a byproduct of fission. (I’m not a nuclear physicist, so my understanding of the real potential here might be wrong, because I have no sense of the quantities that might be experienced). This isn’t a defense of the current regulatory process. The time frames, in particular, sound pretty egregious (4 years to approve a prototype, and 2m pages of documentation feels like a lot, too, but again I don’t know how these things are designed). But I would be extremely uncomfortable with lax regulatory oversight, given that nuclear accidents have permanent, irreversible impacts on society and geography. Now, small-scale reactors may be a different beast entirely. If the quantity of materials is pretty much guaranteed not to have potential to cause problems for anyone but the operators for a short period of time…. Then there certainly seems to be a case for a shorter regulatory cycle. But I would be shocked if scale isn’t already taken into account for the current regulatory burden.