> Why isn't this farmed out to an appropriate regulatory entity with deep expertise?
It is, they just also happen to be a major impediment to new Nuclear power in the US.
It is, they just also happen to be a major impediment to new Nuclear power in the US.
I'm very pro-nuclear, but I'm glad we have the NRC, and I think they are doing a good job.
I'm currently reading the book "The Curve of Binding Energy" [1], about the physicist Ted Taylor. It was written in 1973 and the focus was the possibility, even likelihood, that one day a terrorist organization could build a nuclear bomb. This was before the split of the Atomic Energy Commission into the NRC and the Department of Energy.
Reading the book is a bit like time travel. You move from today's industry-hostile NRC to the absolute opposite: the AEC was completely industry-captured. The laxity of the controls was terrifying. Of course, the author had no idea that in 6 years we'd have the Three Mile Island incident, but for someone in 2024, TMI now makes perfect sense.
Did the NRC become too much of a break for the nuclear expansion. You bet. But I prefer 100 times more to live in a world like we have now than in a world like it was in 1973. We are very lucky that things worse than TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima didn't happen.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968.The_Curve_Of_Bindi...
Why would you only look at the death toll outside the USSR? That doesn't seem like the right way to go about risk analysis and management.
The point is the externalities of nuclear power are localised. Emissions are not.
This is one of those cases where fear blinds people to not accept reality.
First, we need to define what "safe" means. And a safety threshold that is a fair trade-off between public acceptance and the industrial feasibility of the sector.
One might think, sure, increasing safety is always necessary. But we must accept the fact that zero risk does not exist in any technology and will never be completely eliminated in any way. And we already accept the risks of dams and renewables, so it means that a threshold of what is accepted as safe exists, and we can define it.
It seems universally accepted that renewables are "safe." So why not take the deaths per GWh produced and use this value to define a nuclear power plant as safe?
On page 175 (chapter 3.5) of this report compiled by the European Union research center, it shows how third-generation EPRs (modern european reactors) are already several orders of magnitude safer than renewables, per GWh produced. Demonstrating how they are infinitely safer than any other energy source. https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...
Therefore, if we decide to define renewables as safe, we can deduce that modern nuclear power plants are very safe. Yet why is this not perceived?
Obviously, the answer is very simple, the death from installing a panel is an isolated case often limited to a single individual, and often does not make the news. Nuclear, however, even if it causes one death (like Fukushima), is discussed for decades. Besides, the dangers related to the dispersal of radioactive material often cause even more fear than the deaths from the plants themselves, despite rarely having caused tangible damage.
With this said, it's important to note that this fear does not find reflection in the numbers, which remain the reading closest to the reality of the facts.
Finally, from my point of view, even if nuclear were less safe than this, it would still help fight climate change, which should lead to millions of millions of deaths, if not billions. It would be a very logical intellectual step to accept the risks even of a less safe nuclear (and cheaper), because the long-term benefits would definitely be beneficial.