Or maybe I'm wrong. You seem to know a lot about nuclear regulation. Can you tell us a specific, unnecessary burdensome regulatory rule that you feel is holding back progress?
(Example: the Vogtle plants were delayed in part because the NRC decided, after having previously approved the design of the plant, to change its mind and require that the plant be able to withstand a jetliner impact. https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a... )
Maybe. It seems premature to reach that judgment. It depends how many lives regulations would save by hypothetically preventing nuclear catastrophe.
I agree with you about the problems of fossil fuel use. Nevertheless, I think those health dangers are more palatable to politicians and the general public because they are gradual and dispersed, and therefore ignorable; whereas even a single, mild nuclear incident would produce massive negative press.
+1. There are so much flamewar threads but I haven't seen a single technical discussion on a supposedly technical website. Recently I've seen a book review about it. [0] I haven't evaluated the merits of the author's arguments, so I can't say I endorse it unconditionally, but there's a lot of interesting food for thought.
In summary, the author's claims are that regulations are unnecessarily strict mainly because of the ALARA safety guidelines. For regulatory purposes, safety risks must be minimized to As Low As Reasonably Achievable. As a result, whenever a new technology becomes available, the safety standard also increases in responsive. By design, the cost is always high in spite of technological improvement.
> An example was a prohibition against multiplexing, resulting in thousands of sensor wires leading to a large space called a cable spreading room. Multiplexing would have cut the number of wires by orders of magnitude while at the same time providing better safety by multiple, redundant paths. A plant that required 670,000 yards of cable in 1973 required almost double that, 1,267,000, by 1978, whereas “the cabling requirement should have been dropping precipitously” given progress at the time in digital technology.
Sometimes the regulation involves considering certain failure modes that are physically impossible:
> Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.”
A related issue is that the currently accepted principle of radiation safety is a linear, no threshold model. All ionizing radiation is seen as harmful, no matter how low, in spite of the scientific evidence that suggests a low level of ionizing radiation has a negligible effect when it's within the DNA's self-repair capabilities. The result is that radiation safety regulations can often be unnecessarily strict across the entire discipline of nuclear science.
> 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. [...] 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.
> [...]
> One the biggest labs is Argonne outside Chicago. At Argonne, they monitor people going in and out of some of the buildings for radiation contamination. The alarms are set so low that, if it’s raining, in coming people must wipe off their shoes after they walk across the wet parking lot. And you can still set off the alarm, which means everything comes to the halt while you wait for the Health Physics monitor to show up, wand you down, and pronounce you OK to come in. What has happened is that the rain has washed some of the naturally occurring radon daughters out of the air, and a few of these mostly alpha articles have stuck to your shoes. In other words, Argonne is monitoring rain water.
Yet another factor is that strict regulations on nuclear reactors makes research and development difficult, as they're subject to the same stringent regulations, including building a complete model of all possible failure modes.
> Many questions arise during NRC design review: how a plant will handle the failure of this valve or that pump, etc. A natural way to answer these questions would be to build a reactor and test it, and for the design application to be based in large part on data from actual tests. [...] But under NRC rules, you cannot build even a test reactor without a license, and you can’t get a license until all such questions are resolved.
Overall, the author argued that the current regulation is founded on the false promise that a nuclear power plant can never fail with an unrealistic safety target. Instead, radiation release should be accepted as an inevitable but very rare occurrence.
> Instead of selling a lie that a radiation release is impossible, the industry should communicate the truth: releases are rare, but they will happen; and they are bad, but not unthinkably bad. [...] Rather than saying “a [plane] crash will never happen,” they put data-collecting devices on every plane so that when one inevitably does crash, they can learn from it and improve. This is a healthy attitude towards risk that the nuclear industry should emulate.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ThvvCE2HsLohJYd7b/why-has-nu...
Moreover, none of that is relevant to nuclear regulation. I asked for a specific example of an overly burdensome and unnecessary regulatory rule.
Healthcare companies operate in an environment that is very much not a free market. For these companies, the regulatory burden is welcome as it is a high barrier to entry for new players. Read up on regulatory capture.
As for other industries: sure, some regulations are put in place by the industry itself to preserve the status quo. And other regulations absolutely benefit society, even if they impose a cost to the industry. It's important to separate these two cases. What terrifies me is the lack of nuance in the conservative talking points about "reducing regulation," implying that all regulations are unnecessary obstacles that serve no valid purpose. If you want to reduce regulations, okay: tell me specific regulations that you feel cost more than they are worth to society. Don't just lecture me in general about, "Hey, regulatory capture is a thing." Those blanket arguments are unpersuasive and are often propagated by industry players seeking to free themselves of costly regulations, regardless of their value to society.
If we're talking about the US specifically, I can tell you that business and environmental regulations are vastly lighter than other Western nations. In if we compare the US regulatory framework to non-Western nations, we find that there is a tangible cost to lighter regulatory load, in terms of corruption, fraud, pollution, labor rights abuse.
> I think the alleged blight of "overregulation" has become a conservative mantra but without much basis in fact.
Perhaps you were specifically referring to the case of Nuclear power, but it didn't seem that way. Especially when you mentioned Insurance companies being the problem in the medical industry, as if they somehow exist in their current form independently from the regulatory environment they have helped to craft.
I have no real opinion on where nuclear is overburdened by regulation.
> What terrifies me is the lack of nuance in the conservative talking points about "reducing regulation,"
I think this is really an issue of all issues in society today. Emphatic soundbites resonate with people, nuanced discussion does not. I'd think all politicians do this, and it's most notable when they're making statements about things we personally disagree on. If it's something we agree on, we happy to forgive and we "know" that the statement's lack of nuance is ok, because we don't want the message to be watered down.
Personally, I think there are many regulations that are good and well thought out, and many that are not. Industry typically does not bear the costs, they are passed on to the consumer. Sometimes this is good. Externalities should be priced in. Sometimes this is not so good, when you have a regulation for every edge case.
I'm not going to get into a debate on specific regulations. But if you don't believe there exists a lot of dumb regulations, just Google "weird regulations".