DOGE goes nuclear: How Trump invited SV into America's nuclear power regulator(propublica.org)
propublica.org
DOGE goes nuclear: How Trump invited SV into America's nuclear power regulator
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-nuclear-power-nrc-safety-doge-vought
2 comments
A pretty strong, evidenced-based argument can be made against current nuclear regulation standards and for less onerous ones.
Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.
Of course regulation is necessary. The point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.
Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.
Of course regulation is necessary. The point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.
Also:does nobody find this sentence disturbing:
He also suggested that regulators should not fret about preparing for so-called 100-year events — disasters that have roughly a 1% chance of taking place but can be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.
“When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up,” he said.