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Apparently the International Atomic Energy Agency spends ~10% of its budget on creating and sharing safety standards [0]. Unfortunately, its safety model flows

• panick21_ 5y ago
  What is the worst thing of all, the US, the one country who could actually maybe lead something like that maybe has the worst possible regulatory standard. The US literally hard coded PWR reactor standards into the regulatory framework. Doing anything else is essentially impossible outside a few niches. That is why a number of companies re-located to Canada. In the US you basically need to give them a design (100+ million investment), lots of money (nobody knows how much) and an unspecified amount of time (great to tell an investor) and then they will tell you what you need to do so they would consider licensing the design. And then you would actually have to go threw that licensing process. And people are wondering why there are no GenIV designs. You can't even do a prove of concept reactor for less money to prove the design. SpaceX basically does that with NASA, they show tests rather then doing more paperwork. You can do a university style research reactor but that really not enough to prototype a serious commercial reactor. To do a prototype you would have to go threw the full process above, that is why most reactor companies go from design directly to product. The Western world should have been a nuclear society since the 80s.
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    Regulation is thus far saving us from most badly ill-advised nuke projects. Some sneak through, costing ratepayers in more politically corrupt places many $billions for, in the end, scrap concrete.
    • panick21_ 5y ago
      Regulation prevents all technical progress for 40+ years is a good thing. Its just mind-blowing that such a statement can be made on a site called 'Hacker News'. Lets promote fear of technology and use regulation from preventing new technology to replace deadly dirty coal for decades and decades. What an amazing plan anti-nuclear people have been pushing for the last 50 years.
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        It has saved us from being saddled today with many more of these leaky ramshackle contraptions that would have cost a $billion each to take apart. I live near Indian Point, recently shuttered for leaks. I expect to be made to pay for dismantling it. I am glad I won't need to pay for several more. Money spent on nukes could have been spent bringing renewable costs down. We could have had solar and wind decades earlier. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House. Ronald Reagan stripped them off. And here we are.
        • NumberWangMan 5y ago
          Ok, I agree with you that the traditional Light Water Reactor design is not a great one. But I don't think that's the main thing. It sounds like our disagreement is -- you're saying that nuclear power is way too expensive, and it's great that the regulation made it economically unprofitable so that we aren't stuck with more of it. I'm saying that it has only been expensive and uncompetitive with other energy sources because the regulatory structure has royally screwed up. It was getting cheaper and cheaper and suddenly turned around and got way more expensive despite no rising material costs, in complete contrast to every other kind of technology. I believe that if we had strict but sensible regulation around nuclear power, it would have long ago driven coal and natural gas power out of business, putting us in a way better position to deal with climate change. Even with Light Water Reactors -- but if we had sensible regulation, we'd have long ago developed much better designs and refined them, driving the price down even more. I've seen a graph that shows how nuclear was getting cheaper all the time, when suddenly the trend reversed and it started getting more expensive. Here's the kind of insanity that results from our current nuclear regs in the USA: "A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained. The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial."[1] I'll totally admit that if we had never made any investment into nuclear, it's possible that renewables might have had more R&D and investment earlier. But it's also possible that we might have just become more reliant on fossil fuels. I think we both share a pretty deep concern for climate change, and if it turns out that renewables + storage are the only real solution, I'm totally happy with that. It's just that I think that with nuclear we can get off fossil fuels faster. I may be wrong. [1] https://radiationeffects.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Rockwell-NN-1997_Whats-wrong-with-being-cautious.pdf https://radiationeffects.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Rock...