Admiral Rickover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover), the father of the nuclear navy would disagre

Admiral Rickover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover), the father of the nuclear navy would disagree with you, but probably in a much more nuanced way than direct contradiction. It is not the red tape, but the difference between oversight and culture. You can not regulate safety and expect safety. Safety does not come from oversight. Safety comes from culture and a shared culture of responsibility for safety. Therefore the adversarial nature of red tape, implying an entity that does taping and therefore bears primary responsibility for safety, encodes within it the set of incentives that will result in eventual doom because alignment is always for cheaper and not for the long term. Safety requires individual responsibility and therefore a culture of responsibility, not to shareholders or next quarters profits, but to a set of values such as safety and competence. This hearing where the head of the nuclear navy tells congress about their philosophy of safety is very much worth a read: https://web.archive.org/web/20060629082752/https://www.navy.mil/navydata/testimony/safety/bowman031029.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20060629082752/https://www.navy.... The end result is that if you are talking about red tape at all then you have not reached a state of understanding because you must breach the topic of culture and alignment. Capitalist alignment of nuclear energy directly results in disaster. A culture that venerates next quarters profits should not run 30 year+ programs for which failure can result in centuries of contamination. Do you want people cut from the same cloth that the people who run BP are cut from running nuclear? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill A congress that asks for cheaper will get cheaper. Unfortunately what is cheap in dollars can be expensive in property, lives, and well-being. A simple word like cheaper is too naive.