[akiselev]

> I am open to specific proposals for reducing regulations in the nuclear sector if there are regulations that impose additional process overhead, don't actually serve a purpose, and survive only from inertia. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are some of these. But I've been discussing nuclear power for 20+ years, starting back on Usenet, and specific proposals are much less common than generic "get rid of red tape" bluster.

Some specific proposals would be to put a minimum nuclear fuel limit on the existing nuclear power plant regulations and create a new class with loosened containment requirements for active reactor designs that are passively safe by nature. Existing regulations are written around reactor designs that hold thousands or tens of thousands of kilograms of nuclear fuel that they have to moderate and keep in check. This is clearly not a viable option for nuclear long term against natural gas and renewables due to the overwhelming cost of manpower and materials which scales poorly. The regulatory overhead, transportation, and storage costs on that much radioactive fuel alone is prohibitively expensive, so we really need to focus on making progress in powered nuclear fission reactors which are impossible under the current regulatory regime.

Designs like the nuclear lightbulb - studied and tested by UTC under a NASA Mars program contract in the late 60s/early 70s - take tens of kilograms of fuel and heat & compress it till it reaches criticality at hundreds of atm and thousands of degrees. Any failure in the system causes a loss of pressure and the core returns to subcritical; even in a worst case scenario like a conventional bomb exploding in the reactor chamber, it would be a minor incident on the level of Three Mile Island. There are many tweaks that have been theorized but untested that would make the reactor even safer. However, any design like this requires regular maintenance of the reactor and completely different levels of containment that are either prohibitively expensive or impossible right now.