Sweden's parliament on Tuesday (20 June) adopted a new energy target, giving the right-wing government the green light to push forward with plans to build new nuclear plants in a country that voted 40 years ago to phase out atomic power.
Do note that one of the major “safety” regulations, the one mandating a shutoff method to deal with a double ended guillotine break, is completely pointless, because a double ended guillotine break is actually impossible. Pipes don’t break like that. The more reliable safety standard is Leak Before Break, and yet, nuclear designers are actually forbidden from designing around that scenario because it would often interfere with the imaginary guillotine break.
Then there are bans on multiplexing control wires. There are dozens of other random regulations that make nuclear plants slightly less safe, but extremely expensive.
That doesn’t even touch on the permitting process. here’s a quote;
the NRC does not benefit when power plants come online. Their budget does not increase proportional to gigawatts generated. Instead, the nuclear companies themselves pay the NRC for the time they spend reviewing applications, at something close to $300 an hour. This creates a perverse incentive: the more overhead, the more delays, the more revenue for the agency.
The result: the NRC approval process now takes several years and costs literally hundreds of millions of dollars.
The regulatory sabotage is real.
Here’s a link explaining it.
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Do note that one of the major “safety” regulations, the one mandating a shutoff method to deal with a double ended guillotine break, is completely pointless, because a double ended guillotine break is actually impossible. Pipes don’t break like that. The more reliable safety standard is Leak Before Break, and yet, nuclear designers are actually forbidden from designing around that scenario because it would often interfere with the imaginary guillotine break.
Then there are bans on multiplexing control wires. There are dozens of other random regulations that make nuclear plants slightly less safe, but extremely expensive.
That doesn’t even touch on the permitting process. here’s a quote;