[bayindirh]

> overregulation.

Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).

Some things needs to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.

So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.

[vablings]

> We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.

I think this is vastly overstated by the media. Boeing is still heavily regulated and has a pretty good safety record compared 20 or 30 years prior. The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

> Some things need to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.

I absolutely agree. I am not for the removing ALL regulations from nuclear energy but there is a whole political servitude cycle that has taken place for a number of years to make nuclear "safer" when in actuality it has little to no influence on the technology and just adds burden and overhead especially in the new construction of a nuclear power plant

Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine. Despite us being regularly exposed various levels of radiation in our lives most people are completely unaware of. Some people are terrified of dental x-rays but will happily jump on an intercontinental flight without any second guess.

I think arguing in the opposite of "you can never be too safe" is kind of like the whole double your bet every time you lose at the casino yes, its technically true but you need an infinite pool of chips for it to work.

[piva00]

> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

Meaning they tried to skirt around the regulations, including regulatory capture by pushing self-certification because competition caught up to them while they spent money on buybacks instead of investing in R&D, perhaps even investing in absorbing some costs of certification of pilots into a new type they could develop into the future instead of relying on a design from 60 years ago.

Mismanagement is what created Boeing's issues, not regulation.

[vablings]

> Meaning they tried to skirt around the regulations, including regulatory capture by pushing self-certification because competition caught up to them while they spent money on buybacks instead of investing in R&D, perhaps even investing in absorbing some costs of certification of pilots into a new type they could develop into the future instead of relying on a design from 60 years ago.

No, this is literally the opposite of what happened. They did not want all the operators to go through lengthy and expensive recertification processes as required by the FAA so they make the system as close as possible which likely cost them millions of dollars.

The issue was that pilots were not aware, they received very little training and knowledge on the subject when they should have had more (just not a new type cert)

[mlinhares]

Its also bullshit to say the EU has less regulation on developing planes than the US. Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.

It became a private equity managed business without ever being bought by private equity.

[Forgeties79]

> Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.

>cutting costs at every corner

Costs like those incurred when adhering to safety standards set by regulations?

[janc_]

Arguing the EU has less regulation than the USA on anything is 99.9999% always wrong.

[ChocolateGod]

Is the 0.0001% kinder eggs?

[seg_lol]

> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

Lost me right here, MCAS may have been motivated by losing type certification (as it should), but everything they did was not a result of regulations. Including upcharging to make the system actually redundant. Had they actually engineered the MCAS properly, they would have never gotten caught in the first place.

[dctoedt]

> Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine.

Yup: It really is big, it really is scary.

[Forgeties79]

> and trying to avoid costs to carriers

Isn’t that just code for trying to violate regulations without getting caught?

[vablings]

Yes but no. They wanted as many pilots to fly the new aircraft as possible without having to get them re-type certified which is pretty expensive. The issue is that pilots were completely unaware of the MCAS and when it malfunctioned there was not correct training in place because the system was "a hidden abstraction"

Clearly the system worked as intended because nobody had to be re-certified to fly the aircraft but being completely unaware of an additional control layer is dangerous and should have been known about by pilots, but Boeing kept it hidden.

[Forgeties79]

So cutting costs in a way that is explicitly unsafe. Seems a little bit like splitting hairs but I get what you’re saying

[ericmay]

There is room between under-regulation and over-regulation.

Given that we are experiencing high costs and other barriers to construction, we can do at least two things: reduce red tape where it makes sense or where the risk is acceptable to help lower costs, or the US government can, through a variety of mechanisms ranging from basic research funding to direct subsidies, spend taxpayer money to try and alleviate costs.

Given that we supposedly (and I agree) need to build nuclear reactors to help power our country and given that we aren’t building them, we can optionally use both levers to encourage construction. There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good, and so having more of them must be more good.

This is not accurate.

Regulations are simply a tool we can wield to achieve desired outcomes within various risk and need-based calculations. More regulations can be good, for example we should ban highway billboards- that would be a good regulation. Or we can eliminate regulations - allow businesses to build more housing using pre-approved designs that meet existing zoning code. Neither is good or bad, except in that it helps to achieve some aim that society has.

The regulation or lack there of, of nuclear energy in the United States has absolutely nothing to do with Boeing airlines screwing up some plane designs. Drawing a conclusion that nuclear energy must be regulated (it is) or over-regulated (it probably is or else we would build more), because of a belief that Boeing airliners weren’t regulated enough is, to put it lightly, nonsense, and you are mistakenly using the application of some regulation or lack of causing some bad things to happen, to imply that more regulation in another area would mean good things happen through this framework of regulation == good.

And further, if you’re going to suggest that Boeing is effectively unregulated, which is untrue in practice and in principal, then I’d argue that was for the best given that it is a hugely successful company that employs tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions have flown and continue to fly on their airlines every single day safely and without incident.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good

The people who don't agree with you are largely reasonable, as you likely are, and are no more infectees of a "mind virus" for holding their opinions than you are for holding yours. There's no need to denigrate them, or misrepresent their views to try to make your point. Indeed, many of them arrived at their opinion after seeing what happens when people push for not-enough regulation: Once bitten, twice shy.

[Forgeties79]

With something as serious as a nuclear reactor, I am OK with over regulation.

[dzhiurgis]

But why not same scrutiny for coal?

[ben_w]

Correct operation of a coal plant has global impact, and therefore coal should be phased out entirely.

Absent that, when a coal plant goes badly wrong, the damage is small enough and localised enough to be affordable.

When a nuclear plant goes wrong, the upper bound for error includes both Chrenobyl and also "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" followed by terrorists repeating the Goiânia accident somewhere.

Making all the failure modes not happen is expensive.

[dzhiurgis]

But one is enforced (nuclear security) and coal is not.

p.s. ICE cars are literally spewing cancer fumes right into kids faces. 0 fucks given. If anything people try to frame EVs as actual devil.

[ben_w]

I would like to enforce a coal ban, but nobody gave me an army with which to do so.

Not that I could've enforced it for all those years even if I had an army, as coal was dominant for so long for the same reason it is now being rapidly displaced: cost.

[nandomrumber]

Except that modern car engines are vastly improved over their 1970’s carburettor fed, catalytic convertered, counterparts.

[nandomrumber]

In the entire history of civil nuclear power "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" has never happened.

The Goiânia accident caused four deaths.

The Chrenobyl reactors weren’t even housed in containment buildings, they were housed in what’s best described as a shed.

Got any real complaints?

[ben_w]

> In the entire history of civil nuclear power "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" has never happened.

This reads a bit like "why do we need a QA department when we don't have any bugs"?

The reason nobody stole the stuff from reactors is because everyone has, by international law and also nonbinding recommendations, security and armed guards making sure they don't. These are not free.

The Goiânia accident was stupidity, not malice, so you can't predict how many people would die if it was done maliciously from how many were killed. My understanding is what keeps people (relatively) safe from this type of attack at the moment, is the public deployment of radiation sensors since 9/11, which we know about because of people with radioisotopes in them for medical reasons getting caught by them. These are not free.

The Chrenobyl reactors were housed in what’s "best described as a shed" because that was cheap. Same for all of the other design issues with those reactors: it made them cheap.

The rules that make reactors expensive are written in incidents.

[Forgeties79]

> The Chrenobyl reactors weren’t even housed in containment buildings, they were housed in what’s best described as a shed.

And why was that allowed? Because of quality regulation?

[Forgeties79]

Why do you think I am more generous towards the coal industry? We are talking about nuclear power. If you would like my opinion on coal, I will gladly give it to you. You never asked.

For starters: I think clean coal is absolute nonsense (I’ve cited the White House’s outrageous stance on this several times on HN) and people brush away the environmental, social, and general health impacts of coal to their own peril. We know the harmful impacts. We know the body count. We have alternatives and it’s time to move on.

I am absolutely 100% critical of the coal industry/power - far more than I am of nuclear. It doesn’t even compare.

So to answer your question:

> But why not same scrutiny for coal?

I’ll give you the same answer I give every person who gives me this tired refrain without ever even trying to suss out what I think about coal: I am. You are misinformed. And it has no impact on my desire to demand the highest safety standards for nuclear power.

[UltraSane]

Over regulation of nuclear energy in the US made it so expensive we didn't replace all fossil fuels with it.

[array_key_first]

I don't think this is true at all.

It's a heavy capex business with very small marginal returns, that takes planning on the order of decades.

AKA, a US company's worst nightmare. Investors don't like that shit, they like half-baked software that code monkeys can pump out.

[UltraSane]

A fully paid off nuclear reactor is extremely profitable because of little fuel cost.

[rbanffy]

Operating a commercial reactor and keeping it up to regulations isn’t exactly cheap. It requires people, periodic inspections, maintenance, and lots of paperwork to prove you are not cutting corners.

[ViewTrick1002]

Nuclear power in a the US was collapsing due to cost and schedule overruns already before TMI.

Blaming regulations seems like trying to find a scapegoat rather than admitting reality.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper

Americans have no broad idea how anything works. Decades of attacks on our education system have left us civically illiterate (and for a lot of people, actually illiterate too.).

[hammock]

> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).

Different people

[psunavy03]

This entire comment is conflating "overregulation" with "no regulation" when these are not at all the same things.

Oh, and with an extra seasoning of Murica Bad on the side.

[mlinhares]

There's also the surprise factor that it just never gets cheaper, the newly formed monopolies quickly take over and push prices up beyond what they were before and milk the cow they were given until all customers are bled dry.

People that missed the solar bandwagon during the Biden admin are going to regret dearly not having installed it at the price and interest it was back then, we'll never see that again.

[stuffn]

Regulation, I’d argue, is a far more efficient route to monopoly than “unchecked capitalism”. If you have enough money you can gain regulatory capture.

If you pay close attention the majority of “evil capitalists” the far left bitches and whines about so much are masters at this. Last mile service, car manufactures, medicine, law, construction, power, water, technology, banking, housing, etc. Most of the world’s billionaires got their money through fucking over the average person with regulatory capture. This must present the leftist with a conundrum they simple ignore because it doesn’t fit their paradigm. More government leads to more control of wealth by fewer people.

This isn’t to say all regulation is bad. However, the line between over-regulating and under-regulating is so thin it’s often better to err on the looser side. Otherwise, in many places, small business is immediately crushed and “late stage capitalism” is the result.

[whoknowsidont]

>I’d argue

You could, but it's without any basis or evidence.

[root_axis]

Regulatory capture is not an argument against regulation, it's an unavoidable externality that has to be managed.

[CamperBob2]

So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe.

Here's what overregulation of nuclear power has done for us over the past several decades: "We can't risk releasing radioactive pollution in an accident, so we'll build coal plants that spew it into the air during normal operation instead."

[whoknowsidont]

Sounds like the other systems are under regulated.

[janc_]

Many countries shut down all their coal plants over a decade ago. Why didn't yours?

[CamperBob2]

Because Greenpeace and other powerful lobby groups convinced Americans that nuclear power was more dangerous than fossil fuels.

I'm not one of those tinfoil hatters who rants about how the anti-nuclear movement was seeded and sponsored by the Soviets... but I will say that if they didn't do that, they overlooked some of the most useful idiots at their disposal.