54 ms·

It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with n

It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes. This whole system of retroactively requiring changes made is absurdly costly and it's why we're stuck in terms of building out new capacity. This is not de-regulation, just changing how we regulate this from something that is actively antagonistic to something that is not.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Gwypaas 3y ago
When we find a systemic risk across the industry, like the requirement for independent core cooling after Fukushima, we should just roll with it and accept it? Tsunamis do not happen everywhere, but the regulators found the risk to be systemic. As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
- concordDance 3y ago
  > we should just roll with it and accept it? When your "safety" regulation is costing a billion dollars per QALY then by imposing it you are killing thousands of people, because that money could have instead been spend on other things like cancer screening that would let you save a thousand times as many lives per dollar.
  - Gwypaas 3y ago
    The other side is, how many QALYs do you get from the at least $150 billion we are spending to clean up Fukushima?
    - concordDance 3y ago
      Very very few indeed, it's stupidly wasteful. The vast majority of that cleanup is incredibly QALY inefficient, spending millions removing tiny bits of radiation from soil that would cause a hundredth of a cancer case. This is because the rules are that they need to return the area to the same radiation levels it used to have, not merely to a safe enough level that further action would be QALY inefficient. Even in 2012 the natural reduction in radiation meant you have only a few square kilometers[1] with exposure levels over 20uSv/h, the level at which we can actually detect a cancer increase. An area that seems to have had less than a thousand people judging by satellite photos. There is no way to justify spending $150 billion cleaning up something that would kill only a couple of people (particularly when you can just pay them the old value of the land/housing and then let them decide whether they want to accept the increased cancer risk) when even in Japan you can save a thousand lives with that money. [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/uploadedImages/wnn/Images/Fukushima_Radiation_map_2011_2012%201280x967.jpg https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/uploadedImages/wnn/Images...
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      Or, even if you assume no disasters, how many QALYs can you buy with the cost difference between a renewables based grid and a nuclear based grid. Enough that no one is building one of the latter (not France, not China, not South Korea), and everyone is building one of the former (including France, China and South Korea)
      - concordDance 3y ago
        A purely renewable grid is sadly more expensive due to storage costs. Even CAES isn't enough to get below nuclear.
        ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        A commonly repeated (was going to say 'believed' but I'm not sure that's actually true) misconception. Why there is a large contingent of people who think nuclear doesn't need storage is a genuine mystery to me. There's been more storage built for nuclear than for any other power source.
makomk 3y ago
Some level of retroactive regulatory changes are required because the industry keeps discovering that the previous way of doing things was substantially less safe than previously assumed. My favorite example of this is that during the golden era of cheap nuclear power mentioned in articles like this, it was the norm to run all the redundant control and monitoring wiring through the same narrow duct in a wall meant to stop fire spreading, fill it with highly flammable foam, and test the foam for air leaks using a bare candle flame. The way we learned this was a bad idea was because workers at Brown's Ferry Nuclear Power Plant actually managed to start a fire and take out a bunch of supposedly redundant monitoring and control systems whilst flooding the control room with smoke. This bad design made both the redundancy and the firestops that were meant to be there ineffective, and the stricter fire regulations required to prevent issues like this are a major cost. You can't just assume that because something hasn't caused a major catastrophe yet that it's safe to continue doing either. This is such bad engineering practice and has played a role in so many major disasters across multiple industries there's even a specific name for it: the normalization of deviance. It's dangerous because it invalidates all the engineering and safety calculations that were meant to prevent disaster, replacing them with a gamble where no-one really knows the odds.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Given when Brown's Ferry was built (construction started in 1966), plus just how many million American engineers, construction workers, and service members had hard-won WWII-era experience with "if you do it that way, then it may burn up / sink / explode with just one hit" design principals - one has to wonder at the management of the Brown's Ferry design process. How did they manage to keep all of the real grown-ups out of the room?
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  It is perhaps sometimes true that it is "less safe than previously assumed", but I'd guess that more often it's "we figured out a way to do it _even safer_", but in either one of these cases, 40+ year old nuclear tech was and is safer than coal power plants, which is the alternative. We crossed "safer than the alternatives" and "safe enough" decades ago. The safety regime in the US around nuclear is out of control and has no connection with any outside context.
FireBeyond 3y ago
> It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes. Leaving aside Soviet-era propaganda and that contribution, this would lead to regular Chernobyl-style events if there was no requirement to implement reactively discovered safety processes.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Gwypaas 3y ago

When we find a systemic risk across the industry, like the requirement for independent core cooling after Fukushima, we should just roll with it and accept it? Tsunamis do not happen everywhere, but the regulators found the risk to be systemic. As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...

concordDance 3y ago
> we should just roll with it and accept it? When your "safety" regulation is costing a billion dollars per QALY then by imposing it you are killing thousands of people, because that money could have instead been spend on other things like cancer screening that would let you save a thousand times as many lives per dollar.
- Gwypaas 3y ago
  The other side is, how many QALYs do you get from the at least $150 billion we are spending to clean up Fukushima?
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Very very few indeed, it's stupidly wasteful. The vast majority of that cleanup is incredibly QALY inefficient, spending millions removing tiny bits of radiation from soil that would cause a hundredth of a cancer case. This is because the rules are that they need to return the area to the same radiation levels it used to have, not merely to a safe enough level that further action would be QALY inefficient. Even in 2012 the natural reduction in radiation meant you have only a few square kilometers[1] with exposure levels over 20uSv/h, the level at which we can actually detect a cancer increase. An area that seems to have had less than a thousand people judging by satellite photos. There is no way to justify spending $150 billion cleaning up something that would kill only a couple of people (particularly when you can just pay them the old value of the land/housing and then let them decide whether they want to accept the increased cancer risk) when even in Japan you can save a thousand lives with that money. [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/uploadedImages/wnn/Images/Fukushima_Radiation_map_2011_2012%201280x967.jpg https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/uploadedImages/wnn/Images...
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Or, even if you assume no disasters, how many QALYs can you buy with the cost difference between a renewables based grid and a nuclear based grid. Enough that no one is building one of the latter (not France, not China, not South Korea), and everyone is building one of the former (including France, China and South Korea)
    - concordDance 3y ago
      A purely renewable grid is sadly more expensive due to storage costs. Even CAES isn't enough to get below nuclear.
      - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        A commonly repeated (was going to say 'believed' but I'm not sure that's actually true) misconception. Why there is a large contingent of people who think nuclear doesn't need storage is a genuine mystery to me. There's been more storage built for nuclear than for any other power source.

makomk 3y ago

Some level of retroactive regulatory changes are required because the industry keeps discovering that the previous way of doing things was substantially less safe than previously assumed. My favorite example of this is that during the golden era of cheap nuclear power mentioned in articles like this, it was the norm to run all the redundant control and monitoring wiring through the same narrow duct in a wall meant to stop fire spreading, fill it with highly flammable foam, and test the foam for air leaks using a bare candle flame. The way we learned this was a bad idea was because workers at Brown's Ferry Nuclear Power Plant actually managed to start a fire and take out a bunch of supposedly redundant monitoring and control systems whilst flooding the control room with smoke. This bad design made both the redundancy and the firestops that were meant to be there ineffective, and the stricter fire regulations required to prevent issues like this are a major cost. You can't just assume that because something hasn't caused a major catastrophe yet that it's safe to continue doing either. This is such bad engineering practice and has played a role in so many major disasters across multiple industries there's even a specific name for it: the normalization of deviance. It's dangerous because it invalidates all the engineering and safety calculations that were meant to prevent disaster, replacing them with a gamble where no-one really knows the odds.

bell-cot 3y ago
Given when Brown's Ferry was built (construction started in 1966), plus just how many million American engineers, construction workers, and service members had hard-won WWII-era experience with "if you do it that way, then it may burn up / sink / explode with just one hit" design principals - one has to wonder at the management of the Brown's Ferry design process. How did they manage to keep all of the real grown-ups out of the room?
MostlyStable 3y ago
It is perhaps sometimes true that it is "less safe than previously assumed", but I'd guess that more often it's "we figured out a way to do it _even safer_", but in either one of these cases, 40+ year old nuclear tech was and is safer than coal power plants, which is the alternative. We crossed "safer than the alternatives" and "safe enough" decades ago. The safety regime in the US around nuclear is out of control and has no connection with any outside context.

FireBeyond 3y ago

> It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes. Leaving aside Soviet-era propaganda and that contribution, this would lead to regular Chernobyl-style events if there was no requirement to implement reactively discovered safety processes.