With the mess they made of air safety I can even imagine what they'd do for Nuclear safety. Trump wants to speed up the building of nuclear plants like it is a McDonald's drive-thru. Who elected this chump? Trump administration considers orders expediting nuclear plant construction The Trump administration is considering several executive orders aimed at speeding up the construction of nuclear power plants to help meet rising electricity demand, according to drafts reviewed by The New York Times. The draft orders say the United States has fallen behind China in expanding nuclear power and call for a “wholesale revision” of federal safety regulations to make it easier to build new plants. They envision the Department of Defense taking a prominent role in ordering reactors and installing them on military bases. “That’s my number one worry,” said Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a frequent critic of the industry. “We’re talking about new reactor technologies where there’s a lot of uncertainty, and the NRC staff often raise a lot of good technical questions. To short-circuit that process would mean sweeping potential safety issues under the rug.”
We can be pretty sure that whichever drunk Trump pulls off Fox "News" to supervise will be totally up to the task. He really cares about serving the American people and keeping them safe.
40-50’ years ago we built a bunch that mostly still work today and provide something around 20% of power. After that nothing. I would think we would have the ability to build new ones that are safer than those 50 years ago but not take 10-20 years to construct.
If we are going to get serious about energy independence and Climate Change, Nuclear Power has to play a very large role in the solution. I do not like EO's as the solution but it could be a first step to getting the Modular Nuclear Reactor market up and running.
No particular order to these thoughts: 1) Reporters are missing a big political aspect of this. The 5 NRC commissioners have 5 year terms, one per year, and typically have 2 Dems, 2 Reps, and 5th from the President's party. But the way the terms stack up, Trump can't make it 3-2 R-D until 2027, unless he's able to get one of 3 Dems to resign first or do a big restructuring like he might be starting here. I'm not surprised to see the attempt being made. 2) NRC's budget is only about $1 billion recovers most of its budget from fees. This is not a fruitful place to save federal money overall. 3) The biggest issues stopping nuclear construction relate to economics. Second is lack of skills trades to actually build the things. Making the NRC more efficient and predictable would be a mild help and making NRC regulations "easier" would be a small part of that. 4) The best way to make the NRC more efficient and predictable is to raise its budget and staff, not lower it, and recover from applicants and license holders. (In other words, do what they're doing now, except more of it and faster.) In particular, the NRC is short on talented mid-career technical staff and these people are going to need to make $$$$, be offered remote work, etc. to get them. This is predictable consequence of some poorly-thought out onboarding processes c. 2005-2010. (Most new NRC hires were for around 50k vs. a market rate of 65k, did 6 months in DC, 6 months at a regional office, back to DC for 6 months, 6 months shadowing plant inspectors, then maybe another 6 months in DC... and then maybe got a permanent job with salary normalization. Employer-of-last-resort in that era.) 5) Radiation limits based on ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) can be obnoxiously low, particularly for public exposure to gaseous effluents which may be conservative by a factor of 100-1000, but they are not a significant reason why we're not pouring concrete at 10 more Vogltes. 6) Edwin Lyman is a professional nuclear critic, but not strictly an anti-nuke. That's an important voice to be heard, but he isn't qualified to be regarded as the foremost expert in the field or to be the one making final decisions. Notably, he's a physicist and not an engineer and like a lot of scientist-not-engineers and folks affiliated with UCS, his grip on cost-benefit analysis and comparison to alternatives is tenuous at best.
So are American Eagles' lives when it comes to wind turbine blades. But this whole kerfuffle about nuclear plants being built haphazardly is worrisome... if they hire DEI workers.
I am all for nuclear playing a part but I’ve yet to see that it can compete cost competitively. Plus it takes a long time to get up and running. you could double the amount of available output on the grid with wind and solar before you could make nuclear even 10 more percent of the grid. Yes wind and solar are intermittent but with growing battery backup it is becoming more reliable.
The narrative I hear is that nuclear was squashed due to excessive regulation. While I’m sure regulation plays a part there must be more to it. Clearly economics is the driver. Why is nuclear so much more expensive than it was 40-50 years ago (adjusted for inflation )
This isn’t an exact fit for the thread, but TX on the verge of some of the stupidest legislation I can recall. They basically want to scale back wind and solar, so they are proposing new fees and onerous regulations even on existing facilities. It’s as if they didn’t realize power demand is growing and renewables in peak periods kick in 30-40%. Even though demand has grown and record summer temps because of growth of solar and now batteries the grid has held up. So when demand is soaring they want to cut supply. What could go wrong? They say they want more natural gas but you don’t just throw up gas plants overnight and there’s a backlog demand for needed turbines. Texas Senate passes bill requiring solar plants to provide power at night Texas Senate passes bill to establish ‘dispatchable’ power credits trading program I we need to invest in some generators for the coming future Republican caused power brown outs.
I read almost all new Texas power has been renewables so I am thinking they feel “woke” and have to stop it.
true. It has been almost all and it has been a lot. It has really bailed TX out. But yeah, it’s woke plus you have fictional characters on Landman bashing it so it must be bad. This could turn out to be biggest energy self own since Germany shutting down its nukes.
