People are always pestering me for concrete examples of the cost of NRC style regulation. I turn them off by telling them it doesn’t work that way. It’s about incentives and motivation. What are the sticks and what are the carrots? Suppose you tell a football player, your overriding priority is not getting hurt. If you get hurt or do anything that might get you hurt, you are out of football for life. Now go out there and win this game.
When you go from a competitive environment where it’s build better/cheaper or die to an environment which is ruled by an autocratic regulator’s goal to prevent a release, everything goes to hell. Paperwork and process trumps substance erecting massive barriers to entry. Cheap becomes “unsafe”.
Everybody’s motivation gets wrong headed, not just the regulators. Incumbents work harder on protecting and deepening their artificial paperwork moat than they do on their product. Workers forced to follow ridiculous, wasteful procedures and sit around waiting for a series of sign offs on an obvious fix rationally decide if the bosses don’t care about doing the job right neither should they. Fixed price contracts become infeasible. The vendors’ goal becomes milk each project for as much money as possible for as long as possible. And the next thing you know, plants take three or four times as long to build as they should and cost five or more times what they should.
My inquisitor walks away shaking his head and saying to himself, where are the facts, he doesn’t have a real argument. //
But an important factor is that getting rid of open racking is at least three times as expensive as it should be because of the paper work required to build a simple steel and concrete can.
In short, NRC style regulation is the reason every nuclear power plant in the US uses dense-packing, which is by far the most likely, non-weapons path to a Chernobyl or larger sized release in the USA. Such a release coupled with the NRC’s immoral, indefensible defense of LNT will cause panic, evacuation, and exile that will shake the country to its roots. Is that a big enough cost for you?
