Red Tape Strangles Nuclear Innovation

Or maybe you should build your new product in Africa

One of the common complaints from the more innovative sorts of people is that pesky government regulations get in their way. If it weren’t for regulators insisting on five years of safety data for a product created last year and / or proof that the lesser spotted nemotode does not have a breeding population in the wasteland you want to build your factory on, you’d have built a huge business selling widgets, employed thousands and beaten your competitors in China to boot.

Now the counter argument by bansturbators and statists is that regulation stops industry from poisoning the general public, polluting the place and so on. And there is undoubtedly a nugget of truth in that. But in recent years (decades) the regulators have expanded their mission way beyond that of the original legislation to obstruct all sorts of things that they should not.

Take for example nuclear power.

In the UK they are most of the way through building one (1) nuclear power station. Construction started in 2016 and is set to finish a decade later. That power station, adjacent to two older ones, took several years to be approved. In the US the third and fourth Vogtle reactors in Georgia were started in 2013 and have just begun operation, as best I can tell there are zero (0) other nuclear power plants under construction in the US today. According to Wikipedia (yes I know, but it’s a convenient summary) planning for Vogtle 3 & 4 started back in 2006. Some level of basic approval was granted in 2008 and over the next five years the regulators gradually approved the entire thing. That means that it took seven years to be approved and another decade to build. A child born when the first paperwork was submitted is now about to graduate from high school.

Lots of people see this as being completely ridiculous and have planned to make nuclear plants that can, at the very least, be built in less than five years and approved in a year or two at most.

So how did this work out?

“NuScale had invested half a billion dollars in getting permits from the NRC,” energy analyst Meredith Angwin told me. “If a power plant does not get built after that level of investment, it discourages other groups from investing in similar power plants.”

...

It took NuScale more than six years to navigate the licensing maze. Congress has demanded that the NRC develop a more streamlined approval process for this new generation of reactors. But so far, industry experts say, the agency’s proposed rule changes are even more complex than the regimen they would replace. In 2022, the NRC abruptly rejected an application from the Silicon Valley startup Oklo to build and operate an innovative 1.5–megawatt microreactor. No one knows what unseen approval hurdles other startups might encounter. “It’s clear that the exorbitant cost of getting through the NRC is going to constrain new entrants into the nuclear space,” Stein says.

from https://www.city-journal.org/article/where-now-for-nuclear-power

Half a billion dollars to do the paperwork and maybe it gets rejected at the end of that after half a decade or so for reasons that are entirely opaque. No wonder there are very few people trying to build new sorts of nuclear power.

It should be noted that the US NRC is far from alone in its sluggishness. Similar complaints have been leveled against regulators in the UK and Europe and this depsite, in the UK at least, government leaders saying they want more nuclear power and specifically to build small modular reactors (SMRs) like those proposed by NuScale

However I have a suggestion for Oklo and NuScale and their foreign competitors.

There’s an entire continent which is desperate for power and where there isn’t much regulation - Africa. For half a billion dollars you could buy enough of a country’s government and enough armed guards to do whatever you wanted. If you produce cheap power at the end of it, you might even make the politicians popular enough they don’t have to fake a election to get re-elected.