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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations. Plant V
by chroma 3y ago
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations.
Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in. Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and construction started, the federal government added new rules about containment vessels being resilient to passenger aircraft impact. The NRC applied these rules retroactively, causing the containment vessel to be redesigned and construction to be halted.[1] The companies working with the NRC are reluctant to criticize regulators, as they fear retaliation from the NRC. The NRC supervises and approves each step of nuclear reactor construction, making it very difficult to schedule work with contractors and suppliers. Honestly, it's amazing this plant was built at all.
1. https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-and-vc-summer-delays/ https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...
- pfdietz 3y agoThe NRC was established just about when the first nuclear buildout collapsed under the weight of its own foolishness. Massive cost overruns did nuclear no favors whatsoever, clearly inadequate safety (especially on those first generation BWRs; hello Fukushima), and (most devastatingly) the deregulation of the US electricity grid, with PURPA (in 1978) and later steps opening grids to non-utility providers. Nuclear projects that would make sense for a monopoly utility (hey, let's boost the capital spending to increase our regulated earnings) no longer made any sense in a competitive market.
- chroma 3y agoFukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every year from the air pollution it spews out. And don't forget that the cause of the meltdown was an earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people! If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity.
- ImaCake 3y agoAbsolutely agree with this take. Coal power plants are a public health disaster on the scale of leaded petrol and no one talks about it. Even wind turbines have a terrible impact on birdlife. The arguments against nuclear are irrational; future generations will wonder what was wrong with people in the late 20th century.
- chickenchicken 3y agoIt shows that the people who considered the location and plant to be safe enough to be wrong.
- wskinner 3y agoIf your standard for “safe enough” is that no one will directly die or be injured, ever, then the only feasible solution is no electricity at all.
- d_sem 3y agoPeople often fail to compare the opportunity cost of alternative methods to nuclear power. At that time the alternative to nuclear was coal power plants. Radioactive carbon isotopes have harmed many times more people than Nuclear.
- ImaCake 3y agoCoal dust, sans radioactive stuff, and coal burning emissions also exact a terrible toll on respiratory health. A lot of people have died, or had much worse lives, thanks to the widespread use of coal.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoDon’t leave out the coal miners. The history of oppressive companies, grueling work conditions, constant possibility of death through any number of horrible circumstances, and the lifelong damage of unprotected mining on the lungs has harmed generations of families should never be forgotten.
- fluxem 3y agoIt’s brings a lot confidence that a nuclear power was built through a legal loophole.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoBecause the regulatory environment is inhospitable to new plants?
- preisschild 3y agoI mean it makes sense, if the Atomic Energy Commission already licensed the plant site, why shouldnt they be able to reuse it?
- pfdietz 3y agoLaws have changed a lot since the AEC existed.
- pas 3y agowithout looking up we can easily bet that anti-nuclear activists did their share of lawsuits to try to get those new laws applied to the plant, so there have been reviews.
- pfdietz 3y agoOne very important milestone was the Calvert Cliffs decision in 1971, applying NEPA to nuclear construction. This was while the AEC still existed, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs%27_Coordinating_Committee,_Inc._v._Atomic_Energy_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Cliffs%27_Coordinating...
- epistasis 3y agoIf the NRC is the problem, then why do we see identical cost overruns and schedule delays for France, Finland, and the UK? I don't think we can blame the NRC for this. There's something deeper.
- StillBored 3y agoSimilar regulatory regimes started by the same groups of people, which work in similar ways? AKA think of every possible thing that could go wrong and mandates designs with have engineering margins far in excess of what the a reasonable analysis of the risks/etc would call for. We could do similar things to renewables by simply mandating that they have carbon free backup sources sufficient to guarantee four of five nines of reliability.
- epistasis 3y agoSo you think this is a realistic possibility for France, a nation that loves nuclear? Have any evidence of these regulations? What regulations can we change? I've looked and looked and never found somebody saying "these regulations are unnecessary" but it's trivial to find examples of management not taking the regulations seriously and then paying for it when they cut corners (basically all the welding for the AP1000s in Georgia and South Carolina). It's also easy to find management errors that ballon costs and cause massive delays. I'm completely unconvinced that we can pin this on the NRC.
- StillBored 3y agoIf you look at the cost overruns in GA quite a number of people have come out and said that no one wants to criticize the NRC, seemingly because they can make your life hell. And change orders, and the like were listed as one of the reasons for the overruns, how much of that do you think is some engineer who designed the plant waking up one day and deciding something needs to be changed, or is it a case of the NRC nitpicking everything, and just loading the whole process up with so much paperwork that everyone is frozen, and any little mistake in the paperwork ends up costing the project. Sure blame the plant mgmt for not having the correct paperwork and delaying the start by 6 months, but who is asking for that paperwork to begin with? A lot of it sounds like a game of gocha, create a problem so complex that its nearly unsolvable and most of the work isn't even welding pipes but putting a thousand people in the chain, everyone of which can stop the line at any time, largely with no repercussions. Sure, contractors mess up, but most contracts are written so that its the contractor who pays for it, not the organization hiring the contractor. So, again, contractor messes up, comes up with a workable mitigation/rework plan, but you sit there for 6+ months arguing about whether its allowed. I've seen first hand the mess of regulation related paperwork it takes to run a normal NG/etc plant, it takes teams to of people to review it every year and assure compliance. Layering the NRC/etc into this is how you end up spending insane amount of capital and producing nothing but paperwork (see nuscale) on a design that isn't particularly ground breaking in the face of existing plants. I can't even imagine how much it would take to certify something like a navy reactor in that kind of environment.
- pythonguython 3y agoI worked with an engineer that came from the Vogtle project and he would talk about the hoops they had to jump through to get anything done. Even the most basic unassuming weld would require tons of paperwork and cooperation from a lot of people.
- lost_tourist 3y agoThere is no doubt that NRC needs to be completely revamped. Maybe we can use a more productive model like the French have.