Aren't you suggesting that the french have more lax worker protections than the US? I would be very skeptical of that claim. Now, maybe it was """hard""" (expensive) to properly protect your workers and so it didn't make business sense, and that for some reason is enough to kill most good things in the US
was unable to eliminate plutonium particles completely from the work spaces so that workers had to wear breathing protection 100% of the time at work. It may be the French are OK with this but the US is not.
Britain built a MOX facility that was unable to make quality fuel
The Russians were concerned enough about the primary route to MOX failing that they developed an alternate "vibropacking" route that they didn't need in the end. Russia is now recycling MOX in the BN-800 reactor.
Hazard pay is sort of passable for risks like falling off a telephone pole, where you pretty much fully prevent it if you're careful and know for sure whether it happened to you or not. It's not at all compelling (morally anyway) for a risk with much higher odds, where you won't know for twenty years whether it gave you cancer. That's just taking advantage of people's shortsightedness, and I don't think "but I paid them really well" is an excuse.
With the Covid pandemic, we all saw that Americans absolutely refuse to wear masks any significant amount of time. Getting them to wear masks all day long would never work in America. In other countries, it's doable.
> Aren't you suggesting that the french have more lax worker protections than the US? I would be very skeptical of that claim. Now, maybe it was """hard""" (expensive) to properly protect your workers and so it didn't make business sense, and that for some reason is enough to kill most good things in the US
This sounds like a stereotype. What an individual country's regulations and negotiated union agreements are are not on a linear scale with France better than the US.
Conventional MOX production involves making little fuel pellets that get sintered in an oven and then somebody uses a glove box to pick up individual pellets and stuff them into a fuel rod. You'd think in 2022 they could find a way to do it with remote handling, but those plutonium particles are pesky in many ways and they are highly detectable whether or not they are dangerous so people will detect them and worry about them.
> It is perfectly fair for different regulators to have different ideas about what is safe.
I'm not saying it isn't, although fairness probably isn't the goal for safety regulations. I'm saying there doesn't exist a continuum of "goodness" that France sits above the US on for worker safety.
