Nuclear deregulation. Yes, I know how that sounds but bear with me. As Koopman and Dourado write in the WSJ:
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 established a precise framework for nuclear regulation, requiring federal licensing only for facilities that either use nuclear material “in such quantity as to be of significance to the common defense and security” or use it “in such manner as to affect the health and safety of the public.” This careful distinction recognized that not every nuclear reactor poses meaningful risks.
Those qualifiers were intentional but for a long time were unimportant because nuclear reactors were big and potentially quite dangerous but that was 70 years ago! Today, there are small, safe nuclear reactor designs which meet the requirements of the 1954 Act.
Small modular reactors are dramatically different from the massive reactors envisioned during the Cold War. The reactors at issue in this case generate a fraction of the power of conventional nuclear plants—around 20 megawatts or less—and are designed with modern safety features that would release close to zero radiation even in a worst-case meltdown scenario. Last Energy’s design operates entirely inside a container with 12-inch steel walls that has no credible mode of radioactive release even in the worst reasonable scenario.
Even in such a scenario, according to the plaintiffs, radiation exposure would be less than a tenth what the NRC has deemed too safe to require regulation in other contexts—and less than 1/800th of a routine abdominal CT scan.
The NRC should not be regulating these reactors. Small scale nuclear should be regulated like x-Ray machines or gas turbines not like billion dollar nuclear power plants, the current rule. Reasonable regulation will allow iterative innovation. As I sais in my post Give Innovation a Chance, innovation is a dynamic process. You must build to build better.
Yet the NRC is stifling this progress. The licensing process alone can take up to nine years. Small modular reactor company NuScale spent more than $500 million just to get its design certification approved by the NRC, a process that took more than two million hours of labor and required millions of pages of information. NuScale still needs to apply for its license, which will multiply these costs.
The NRC rule is currently being challenged in State of Texas v. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I think the case has a good chance of winning which would be a wonderful win for energy abundance.
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