All these regulatory stories seem to fail to connect the full picture back to a suitable regulatory regime that actually saves costs.
With our latest round of nuclear failures, there was a new combined licensing approach taken at the behest of industry. It did not seem to work. The article cites "hundreds of millions for licensing" which is a tiny percentage of reactor cost, and frankly insignificant. For costs to be lower, there has to be a huge, 50%+ drop in construction costs. The latest nuclear failures in the US used a new design, the AP1000, which used something like an order of magnitude less concrete and steel, and that was not enough to pull down costs. Where is the money going? Labor.
The French regulatory regime is presumably OK, as it oversaw a large buildout in the 1970s, and I've never heard anybody complain about it, but it has still resulted in economic failures at Flamanville and Olkiluoto.
Eliminate ALARA, and what construction or design cost savings are there? I'm not sure and it's not really clear. What construction site savings are there? Ignore the containment? People all agreed that after Chernobyl is was a bad idea, what engineer is going to sign off on that? Maybe they are OK with it, but I haven't heard any engineer brave enough to cite a lessening of safety that would drive down construction costs.
Also, all large construction projects, the heart of nuclear, have gotten expensive in the US, even without the NRC. It's just a hard problem to build big things with complicated logistics.
Look at construction productivity trends over the past 50 years, and they have been stagnant compared to manufacturing and other types of productivity. And as productivity increases in an economy, overall wages increase, even for the less productive construction sector, because workers have the choice to work in more productive fields, and must be paid to compensate for the low productivity of working in construction. The places closest to having low costs on nuclear are economies with cheap labor: Russia and China. It's going to be hard for us to outsource construction labor to cheap countries when the reactors need to be sites in high labor cost countries.
Even if regulation is a major factor, this labor cost of construction is also a major factor. And it's unclear to me why nuclear should ever be cheap. It's a huge huge construction project, and in advanced economies, those are still very expensive.
> And as productivity increases in an economy, overall wages increase, even for the less productive construction sector, because workers have the choice to work in more productive fields, and must be paid to compensate for the low productivity of working in construction.
With our latest round of nuclear failures, there was a new combined licensing approach taken at the behest of industry. It did not seem to work. The article cites "hundreds of millions for licensing" which is a tiny percentage of reactor cost, and frankly insignificant. For costs to be lower, there has to be a huge, 50%+ drop in construction costs. The latest nuclear failures in the US used a new design, the AP1000, which used something like an order of magnitude less concrete and steel, and that was not enough to pull down costs. Where is the money going? Labor.
The French regulatory regime is presumably OK, as it oversaw a large buildout in the 1970s, and I've never heard anybody complain about it, but it has still resulted in economic failures at Flamanville and Olkiluoto.
Eliminate ALARA, and what construction or design cost savings are there? I'm not sure and it's not really clear. What construction site savings are there? Ignore the containment? People all agreed that after Chernobyl is was a bad idea, what engineer is going to sign off on that? Maybe they are OK with it, but I haven't heard any engineer brave enough to cite a lessening of safety that would drive down construction costs.
Also, all large construction projects, the heart of nuclear, have gotten expensive in the US, even without the NRC. It's just a hard problem to build big things with complicated logistics.
Look at construction productivity trends over the past 50 years, and they have been stagnant compared to manufacturing and other types of productivity. And as productivity increases in an economy, overall wages increase, even for the less productive construction sector, because workers have the choice to work in more productive fields, and must be paid to compensate for the low productivity of working in construction. The places closest to having low costs on nuclear are economies with cheap labor: Russia and China. It's going to be hard for us to outsource construction labor to cheap countries when the reactors need to be sites in high labor cost countries.
Even if regulation is a major factor, this labor cost of construction is also a major factor. And it's unclear to me why nuclear should ever be cheap. It's a huge huge construction project, and in advanced economies, those are still very expensive.