It also took two years for the NRC to provide this rejection.
Please don't excuse incompetence on an issue this important to the future.
This right here is the problem.
It is actually possible to over-regulate something, no matter what it is. The more people believe something needs to be regulated, the more likely it is to be regulated disproportionate to the need. Consider the safety record of commercial nuclear power in the US.
So some coal company gets a regulation inserted that says that in order to open a new nuclear reactor, you must first push a boulder up a hill for a thousand years.
Later someone does a cost benefit analysis on that regulation, it turns out to be costing a lot while actually making safety worse, so they propose to repeal it.
Headline: Get your Pitchforks, People, They Want To Deregulate Nuclear Power
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
>Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.
>This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can‘t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.
The well-established LWR has had continuous improvement both in terms of reliable performance, high uptime, and reduced occupational exposure for nuke workers.
The cost problem is not over-regulation but: (1) the LWR depends on an oversized steam turbine and heat exchangers that an order of magnitude more expensive than the gas turbines used to produce energy from fossil fuels today; they quit building coal plants in 1980 for the same reason they quit building nuclear plants, the cost of the steam turbine. Even if the heat was free the steam turbine would struggle. (2) Building an LWR is a bungle-bung bridge right out of Dr. Seuss, it's hard to find a complete reckoning but it seems anything that can go wrong will go wrong, everything from All-American Cost Disease to the factory in China that struggles to build the pump that was supposed to be cheaper to manufacture.
Even if LWR construction went 100% to plan, (1) would still make the LWR unattractive. You might be able to add pre or post combustion carbon capture to the gas turbine, compress the CO2 to 1500 psi and inject it into a saline aquifer for less.
If you want "the power to save the world" you gotta quit it with the "conservative" claptrap and take the radical step of coupling a higher temperature reactor to a closed-cycled gas turbine powerset. In the 1970s it was thought that a fast reactor had to be more expensive than an LWR but in the 2020 it is not worth moving forward unless you can do better.
Instead, regulators may have opportunities to improve the process to make it easier for applicants to understand what they must do to receive approval. In this case, I have the impression the NRC did adequately explain what Oklo needs to improve in its application.
I've done some first mover approval work in biology, and yes it's more work, but all first movement is more work in every way because you're pioneering something new. The FDA, at least, is not unreasonable and is usually very open about the bar they think they need to set. You just need to talk to them, request a meeting, and show up. And also realize that it's going to be an iterative process, as any new product design process is also iterative.
Surely there is some other nation state that is less risk averse and open to nurturing innovation.