Nuclear regulation should be more like pipe safety regulation during World War 2

> A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.

>The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.

Also about one of the primary testing groups effectively failing workers for radiation gathered on their shoes from radon in rain water.

There are very great reasons that LNT and ALARA radiation risk models are very flawed.

So, stopped clock? Ok. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can fix here. Make them entirely wrong not even right twice a day and I’ll be interested in ideas past the over-regulation. Until then, we have evidence that the industry is being made artificially expensive. And that it isn’t actually comparable to other options.

When I last checked why a nuclear plant in the UK was running late, the answer came back to be about Fukushima and nuclear regulations. Because of the earthquake, the design of the core was updated to require a kind of exotic steel that only get produced by a few companies in the world, and it took the company several attempts to produce it. This added significant delays and costs, as producing materials at the limit of human capability is both expensive and time consuming.

There is multiple possible target of blame here. The foundries in China. The lack of competition in that space. The design choice to use very exotic materials. The regulator reaction to Fukushima, or the panic to issue an very expensive quick fix for an existing design.

The economics of nuclear power is difficult to even estimate when stupidity like that occur with regularity.

The article kind of describe the lack of urgency that world war 2 provided, and fossil fuels could be the missing trigger. Operate the energy grid we got now without using unsafe fossil fuels that pollute the environment, causing max extinction, floods, famine, displacement and general mayhem on the planet.

Forced to be without fossil fuels, maybe nuclear deserve a second look. It is distinctly safer for human and the world in general compared to fossil fuels. You can't really get a more unsafe system than releasing the toxic waste into the air, and even if nuclear plant did that it would still be likely safer than coal. Per energy produced, coal plants create more radioactive waste than nuclear, and they just release it into the air.

Well, from this article we know he's a Mormon...