Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

This is very much required. Sadly the US nuclear regulatory environment has been an absolute disaster and very much hurt the global evolution of nuclear power.

The worst thing is that it is impossible licence a non LWR reactor in the US. Because a licence requires specific systems to exist, that might not even make sense in most other reactors. Additionally you have to pay the regulator for their feedback and the whole process, adding 10s of millions to your development cost, and that is for a traditional LWR reactor.

Furthermore many regulations and subsidies are built around 'renewables' rather then non-carbon energies. Production tax credit, build requirements and so on.

Furthermore the US government has massive capability and facilities but they are not used well for innovation and there is very little interaction between nuclear startups and these facilities. Having a government that allows stronger sustained cooperation between regulators, companies and government capabilities will be required to change the licencing process and the whole nuclear industry.

Interestingly there seems to be now some amount of bipartisanship about nuclear and bills are passing surprisingly quickly.

The University of Michigan had some great talks and debates that people might find interesting, this video explains some about the bills that have passed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1lkDRX2huM

What about the rest of the world? Does every developed country have similar regulatory burdens, or is there some other factor at play preventing newer designs from being developed and put into production?

I'd really like to see the newer designs built out at least somewhere, but I have a feeling that there is more to it than what I've read in the pop-sci articles.

France is one of the leaders in nuclear tech and they got there by partnership between the state-owned power company and governement research. Private nuclear companies benefited from that and they export nuclear reactors to other countries.

Yet they still have a strong regulatory burden, but the difference with the US is that they have a vested interest in not hampering nuclear tech, whereas here nuclear tech is not high on national priorities. I guess it's another case of #followTheMoney :)

The problem with France is that they had a strongly state driven program based on pretty old technology.

They pushed foreword on that technology but never truly innovated on an industrial scale by having new types of reactors deployed in large numbers.

Its basically a large state industry that is very, very heavy footed.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...

Excerpts:

* Nuclear power capacity worldwide is increasing steadily, with about 50 reactors under construction.

* Most reactors on order or planned are in the Asian region, though there are major plans for new units in Russia.

* Significant further capacity is being created by plant upgrading.

* Plant lifetime extension programmes are maintaining capacity, particularly in the USA.

About 50 power reactors are currently being constructed in 13 countries (see table below), notably China, India, UAE and Russia.

Also, see World Nuclear Performance Report 2018 http://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/on...

> Nuclear power capacity worldwide is increasing steadily, with about 50 reactors under construction.

The decommissioning of nuclear reactors is far outpacing the construction of new plants.

https://www.reuters.com/article/energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-...

The report: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-2018-.html

Many countries follow the NRC's lead, but there are exceptions. For example, Canada has regulators who are much friendlier to new reactor development, and Terrestrial Energy, a molten salt reactor company, has spoken highly of them and is making good progress. Moltex recently moved there as well. Russia has two sodium-cooled fast reactors on the grid and is working on more.

But China is the real leader. They're aggressively developing every major GenIV category, including two government-funded molten salt reactors. Terrapower moved their traveling wave reactor to China after giving up on the U.S.

AFAIK nuclear power generation is outright banned in Australia (with the exclusion of the Lucas Heights medical reactor).

Yes. Very sadly so.

One of the create successes of anti-nuclear moment. Its band in a very destructive way where the minster is not even allowed to start a concept plan or anything like it.

The MSR design invented in the 1950s in the U.S. are maturing in the recent decade.

Among major nuclear powers, China is advancing fast on safer and smaller Gen IV reactors, specially the Thorium based Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR). They built and validated the design will commit a huge amount of funding to improvement and build-outs.[1]

[1] https://neutronbytes.com/2018/01/07/recent-developments-in-a...

Here is a HN discussion a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17813614

Well, the western world by and enlarge took the US lead. Some of the European countries have their own programs of course.

But in terms of regulatory and commercial, and integration of government and markets they didn't do much better.

The reality is that in the west power was a matter of state control much of the time, and with nuclear being such a politically decisive policy it was really difficult ever get into a better situation.

China and India are working on new designs. India is kind of slow but they are jugging along. China is doing much better and they are gone be the major builder of nuclear power in the future.

Many companies move to China, for example Bill Gates company.

However in terms of the west, Canada has had the balls to go its own way with the CANDU reactors and now because that program has been privatized and not much further development is gone happen, they have turned to SMR and to improve the regulatory environment.

This means that there are now above 10 nuclear companies trying to build GenIV reactors in Canada. The one leading, because they have cleared the first regulatory hurdle, is Terrestrial Energy a molten salt reactor.

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