6 ms·

US nuclear regulator: 2,868 employees; 47 yrs in operation; 0 license approvals

94 points by jger15 5y ago

petermcneeley 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
mint2 5y ago
The NRC is slow and needs reforms, but it’s duties encompass more than approving licenses. So I find this headline very misleading. Also, how many of whatever license type that stat is about have been submitted?
sephamorr 5y ago
Sure, the NRC is not approving new reactor designs, and this is a real problem. One of the quoted articles cites the cost decline in South Korean nuclear as the example that regulations matter. Missing is the context that nuclear power in SK has been moving in the opposite direction in cost in the past 15 years - quickly. Nuclear projects all around the world are over budget and behind schedule; the subsidies required to get them built keep increasing. Even China hasn't started construction of a new commercial reactor since 2016. The costs of GenIII+ designs just seem uncontrollable. I certainly do hope that GenIV designs can address these costs and trends - and an awful regulatory environment certainly makes this tough - but I have a hard time seeing how the costs can come down enough to make nuclear economically feasible beyond particular niches.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  > Even China hasn't started construction of a new commercial reactor since 2016 China has 14 commercial reactors under construction, 11 of which started construction after 2016. https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
jti107 5y ago
how many applications have been submitted? its only been the last decade that anyone seriously started working on new fission reactor designs in the united states. as far as i know there is only one company that has submitted an application and its a SMR (small modular reactor) which is somewhat different paradigm than current fission reactors.
advisedwang 5y ago
There's also been hardly any nuclear investment initiated because of anti-nuclear sentiment, poor economic viability and booms in other energy areas. Therefore the baseline to compare to is probably only a few applications, not the boom of reactors from projects initiated in the 50s and 60s.
cinntaile 5y ago
This tweet makes no sense. Licenses have been approved, recently they approved the NuScale SMR design for example. They didn't approve Oklo's SMR design a couple of weeks ago and the CEO of that company then brought up the statistic. The tweet this one is citing is better. "No license initially submitted to the NRC has yet begun operations." The designs just don't seem to make it to production for some reason. The reason or reasons can't be deduced from this statistic.
BMc2020 5y ago
I can't prove it (not an accountant), but commercial nuclear has never made money anywhere, in any country. It's always subsidised by the government (to support military nuclear). When you dig into it they get loan guarantees, favoritism, and using accounting tricks like wishing away decommissioning costs by claiming reactors will be working for 60 or even 100 years. The US DOE basically supports the US nuclear power industry, budget wise. Advocates always point out the very low death rate from nuclear accidents (true) but fall silent on the cost of making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable. TL:DR; Nuclear has many benefits over over the carbon club but being cheaper is not one of them.
- MisterMower 5y ago
  The same outcome would befall wind and solar energy if you applied the same regulatory structure and burden to them. Cost would balloon and innovation would stop. Try making wind farms abide the same siesmic requirements and end of life plans that we hold nuclear to. They would become wildly expensive and uneconomical. Swap regulatory structures between wind and nuclear, wait two decades and you’ll see a bunch of NYT articles talking about how toxic it is for workers and the environment to be sawing fiberglass wind turbine blades into pieces to dump in a landfill when they are no longer economically viable due to asinine regulations.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    But that is the case already, solar/ wind farms have to have decommission plans, environmental impact plans etc. In fact building a wind farm faces large amount of regulations. I'd argue considering the difference in consequences of failure it's the amount of regulations faced by wind and solar compared to solar is quite unfair. I also find the arguement that we should put the same regulations on solar wind as on nuclear weird. The consequences of a failure is many orders of magnitude different, the considerations when decommissioning are vastly different etc..
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      Solar/wind don't have to abide by anywhere near the same amount of regulations as nuclear, your second point notwithstanding.
halestock 5y ago
> If we churned these things out like iPhones, they'd be damn cheap. If an iphone had the potential to render a city/country/continent uninhabitable for decades, I'm willing to bet the FCC would have a bit more stringent approval process.
- toolcombinator 5y ago
  Nonsense. Modern reactors are safe. Even the old (inherently unsafe) reactors like the Soviet Chernobyl style design aren’t some sort of apocalyptical danger. Less than 40 people died in one of the most serious accidents ever (Chernobyl). That’s a fraction of the number of people killed every year because of windmills and fossil fuels. Far from “rendering cities uninhabitable for decades” there is no reason why Chernobyl couldn’t be repopulated today. Heck, they have tourists visit the site every day these days.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    I think it was more like 60 people. 30 people was just the number who died in the initial explosion. Presumably a lot more people would have died if it wasn't for a really expensive and heroic cleanup / disaster management effort.
    - xyzzy123 5y ago
      These figure are also only true if you don't count QALYS injuries to the 600,000 liquidators involved in the cleanup, or believe that radiation exposure to those living in the area was harmless and resulted in no deaths.
      - devonkim 5y ago
        I’m not going to minimize the dangers of nuclear but doing good faith comparisons would mean that we should consider the full human and ecological costs of the status quo as well which is much more catastrophic than even a Chernobyl level incident every decade. If solely comparing radiation fossil fuel production is much worse than nuclear of all things as well even counting accidents like Fukushima, Three Mile, and Chernobyl. Independent reviews (of course I wouldn’t trust USSR orgs) of the Chernobyl fallout I’ve read (including out into EU where wind currents would theoretically have created higher cancer rates) show nothing really conclusive. Similar for follow-ups from Fukushima (yes, I’m aware of the radiation levels in the water). These nuclear v renewable distractions seem to do nothing to get us off the clear and present danger of fossil fuels, which is my big frustration.
ncmncm 5y ago
If it takes that many people to keep these ramshackle contraption boondoggles from being built, that is money well spent. Most usually, if construction starts, they cost billions of dollars before they are cancelled. They never give back any of the money afterward.
toolcombinator 5y ago
And that’s why the US has been falling behind in the Nuclear industry around the world. A growing number of countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa are looking to nuclear power as a clean and cheap source of energy. But they’re going for Russian, Japanese or Korean designs where they once might have used an American designed reactor.
xbmcuser 5y ago
The better stat would be how many applications rejected they are a regulator their job is to stop those that don't meet the standards. I think many western kids of today complaining about goverment regulations should go and live a few years in a few 3rd world/Devolping countries. This is the main reason though I am pro nuclear I don't believe it can be source of electricity for the world in the near future. Not because of the tech but that it will be run by humans. Enough Humans are self serving greedy assholes that put nuclear tech in hands of everyone is impossible.
edmcnulty101 5y ago
I don't have any data but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just the tip of the iceberg in mind boggling inefficient government agencies. Like not slightly inefficient...or even significantly inefficient...but outrageously unbelievably inefficient.
IMAYousaf 5y ago
That seems like an alarmingly bad statistic.
- boshomi 5y ago
  maybe there really wasn't anything to approve because nuclear is already dead and it's time to say it. In a setting with a very high share of renewable energy, the need for sluggish power plants such as nuclear power plants declines while the need for grid scale energy storage systems increases

94 points by jger15 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

mint2 5y ago

The NRC is slow and needs reforms, but it’s duties encompass more than approving licenses. So I find this headline very misleading. Also, how many of whatever license type that stat is about have been submitted?

sephamorr 5y ago

Sure, the NRC is not approving new reactor designs, and this is a real problem. One of the quoted articles cites the cost decline in South Korean nuclear as the example that regulations matter. Missing is the context that nuclear power in SK has been moving in the opposite direction in cost in the past 15 years - quickly. Nuclear projects all around the world are over budget and behind schedule; the subsidies required to get them built keep increasing. Even China hasn't started construction of a new commercial reactor since 2016. The costs of GenIII+ designs just seem uncontrollable. I certainly do hope that GenIV designs can address these costs and trends - and an awful regulatory environment certainly makes this tough - but I have a hard time seeing how the costs can come down enough to make nuclear economically feasible beyond particular niches.

credit_guy 5y ago
> Even China hasn't started construction of a new commercial reactor since 2016 China has 14 commercial reactors under construction, 11 of which started construction after 2016. https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

jti107 5y ago

how many applications have been submitted? its only been the last decade that anyone seriously started working on new fission reactor designs in the united states. as far as i know there is only one company that has submitted an application and its a SMR (small modular reactor) which is somewhat different paradigm than current fission reactors.

advisedwang 5y ago

There's also been hardly any nuclear investment initiated because of anti-nuclear sentiment, poor economic viability and booms in other energy areas. Therefore the baseline to compare to is probably only a few applications, not the boom of reactors from projects initiated in the 50s and 60s.

cinntaile 5y ago

This tweet makes no sense. Licenses have been approved, recently they approved the NuScale SMR design for example. They didn't approve Oklo's SMR design a couple of weeks ago and the CEO of that company then brought up the statistic. The tweet this one is citing is better. "No license initially submitted to the NRC has yet begun operations." The designs just don't seem to make it to production for some reason. The reason or reasons can't be deduced from this statistic.

BMc2020 5y ago

I can't prove it (not an accountant), but commercial nuclear has never made money anywhere, in any country. It's always subsidised by the government (to support military nuclear). When you dig into it they get loan guarantees, favoritism, and using accounting tricks like wishing away decommissioning costs by claiming reactors will be working for 60 or even 100 years. The US DOE basically supports the US nuclear power industry, budget wise. Advocates always point out the very low death rate from nuclear accidents (true) but fall silent on the cost of making 150 square km of Japan uninhabitable. TL:DR; Nuclear has many benefits over over the carbon club but being cheaper is not one of them.

MisterMower 5y ago
The same outcome would befall wind and solar energy if you applied the same regulatory structure and burden to them. Cost would balloon and innovation would stop. Try making wind farms abide the same siesmic requirements and end of life plans that we hold nuclear to. They would become wildly expensive and uneconomical. Swap regulatory structures between wind and nuclear, wait two decades and you’ll see a bunch of NYT articles talking about how toxic it is for workers and the environment to be sawing fiberglass wind turbine blades into pieces to dump in a landfill when they are no longer economically viable due to asinine regulations.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  But that is the case already, solar/ wind farms have to have decommission plans, environmental impact plans etc. In fact building a wind farm faces large amount of regulations. I'd argue considering the difference in consequences of failure it's the amount of regulations faced by wind and solar compared to solar is quite unfair. I also find the arguement that we should put the same regulations on solar wind as on nuclear weird. The consequences of a failure is many orders of magnitude different, the considerations when decommissioning are vastly different etc..
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Solar/wind don't have to abide by anywhere near the same amount of regulations as nuclear, your second point notwithstanding.

halestock 5y ago

> If we churned these things out like iPhones, they'd be damn cheap. If an iphone had the potential to render a city/country/continent uninhabitable for decades, I'm willing to bet the FCC would have a bit more stringent approval process.

toolcombinator 5y ago
Nonsense. Modern reactors are safe. Even the old (inherently unsafe) reactors like the Soviet Chernobyl style design aren’t some sort of apocalyptical danger. Less than 40 people died in one of the most serious accidents ever (Chernobyl). That’s a fraction of the number of people killed every year because of windmills and fossil fuels. Far from “rendering cities uninhabitable for decades” there is no reason why Chernobyl couldn’t be repopulated today. Heck, they have tourists visit the site every day these days.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pasabagi 5y ago
  I think it was more like 60 people. 30 people was just the number who died in the initial explosion. Presumably a lot more people would have died if it wasn't for a really expensive and heroic cleanup / disaster management effort.
  - xyzzy123 5y ago
    These figure are also only true if you don't count QALYS injuries to the 600,000 liquidators involved in the cleanup, or believe that radiation exposure to those living in the area was harmless and resulted in no deaths.
    - devonkim 5y ago
      I’m not going to minimize the dangers of nuclear but doing good faith comparisons would mean that we should consider the full human and ecological costs of the status quo as well which is much more catastrophic than even a Chernobyl level incident every decade. If solely comparing radiation fossil fuel production is much worse than nuclear of all things as well even counting accidents like Fukushima, Three Mile, and Chernobyl. Independent reviews (of course I wouldn’t trust USSR orgs) of the Chernobyl fallout I’ve read (including out into EU where wind currents would theoretically have created higher cancer rates) show nothing really conclusive. Similar for follow-ups from Fukushima (yes, I’m aware of the radiation levels in the water). These nuclear v renewable distractions seem to do nothing to get us off the clear and present danger of fossil fuels, which is my big frustration.

ncmncm 5y ago

If it takes that many people to keep these ramshackle contraption boondoggles from being built, that is money well spent. Most usually, if construction starts, they cost billions of dollars before they are cancelled. They never give back any of the money afterward.

toolcombinator 5y ago

And that’s why the US has been falling behind in the Nuclear industry around the world. A growing number of countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa are looking to nuclear power as a clean and cheap source of energy. But they’re going for Russian, Japanese or Korean designs where they once might have used an American designed reactor.

xbmcuser 5y ago

The better stat would be how many applications rejected they are a regulator their job is to stop those that don't meet the standards. I think many western kids of today complaining about goverment regulations should go and live a few years in a few 3rd world/Devolping countries. This is the main reason though I am pro nuclear I don't believe it can be source of electricity for the world in the near future. Not because of the tech but that it will be run by humans. Enough Humans are self serving greedy assholes that put nuclear tech in hands of everyone is impossible.

edmcnulty101 5y ago

I don't have any data but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just the tip of the iceberg in mind boggling inefficient government agencies. Like not slightly inefficient...or even significantly inefficient...but outrageously unbelievably inefficient.

IMAYousaf 5y ago

That seems like an alarmingly bad statistic.

boshomi 5y ago
maybe there really wasn't anything to approve because nuclear is already dead and it's time to say it. In a setting with a very high share of renewable energy, the need for sluggish power plants such as nuclear power plants declines while the need for grid scale energy storage systems increases