Mopani says:
July 22, 2025 at 1:18 PM
“Investors studiously seek to minimize or mitigate uncertainty.”
Absolutely 100%. The present operational method of the NRC militates against this very desire for certainty. ALARA and LNT both destroy certainty, and as others have pointed out, recent builds have proven it, with the NRC changing the rules mid-build. At minimum, once a construction license is awarded, the NRC should not be allowed to change the rules that the license was awarded under.
Mopani says:
July 22, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Separately from my previous comment, the US NRC logo in the article says everything about the viewpoint of the NRC: “Protecting People and the Environment” — from nuclear power evidently.
A better tagline would be “Clean & Safe Energy for All”. The NRC as presently constituted is not about promoting safe energy, its about promoting safety.
An illustration: If the first rule of traffic safety is “safety first” then 35MPH would be the maximum speed limit. If the first rule of traffic safety is “keep the traffic moving” then speed limits and other rules take their rightful place — accidents impede the flow of traffic, so traffic rules should help prevent accidents, but the rules become subservient to the primary goal of keeping traffic flowing.
The safety rules around Nuclear power should be subservient to the rule that nuclear power should be plentiful, cheap, and safe. Those are not unachievable goals. The failure of the NRC is to regard nuclear accidents as somehow more special than any other industrial accident, contributing to the culture of treating nuclear power as more dangerous than any other industry. As Petr Beckmann noted in the title of his book, “The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear”, depriving society of plentiful, cheap and safe energy is more hazardous.
