Other voices: In need of nuclear-energy innovation

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As America’s energy demands grow exponentially, the country won’t be able to keep up without more nuclear power. For decades, the climate-friendly industry has been held back by overly burdensome regulations, but that’s beginning to change.
In the 1960s, plants took about four years to build, and they cost, in today’s dollars, about $1,500 per kilowatt of electricity generated. Now the idea of building a reactor in less than a decade is unheard of, and the cost of construction is six times greater.
The Energy Department took steps last month to exempt certain advanced reactors from duplicative environmental reviews. It’s also flirting with relaxing radiation standards and eliminating some over-the-top security requirements at nuclear plants.
Defenders of the status quo try to prey on people’s fears of nuclear technology. NIMBYs and radical environmentalists pretend that overregulation is not actually the reason for the industry’s malaise and is instead necessary to instill public confidence.
This ignores the many undue burdens that federal agencies have placed on projects. Sometimes, regulators have even forced changes to designs mid-construction, as happened in 2009, when they required containment buildings for reactor developments in Georgia and South Carolina to be able to withstand direct aircraft strikes, driving up costs and delaying construction.
It’s no surprise that regulatory costs surged after the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, but the pendulum has swung too far. Nuclear developers have a point about onerous documentation rules. The administration would do well to emphasize regulatory stability, as well as explore how technology such as artificial intelligence can help alleviate paperwork burdens.
Capital is already pouring into the nuclear industry from big firms like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Yet billions in new investment won’t mean much if the regulatory state refuses to challenge long-held norms.
Take, for example, the government’s overly stringent radiation standards. The Trump administration has indicated it will reform a decades-old rule requiring nuclear power plants to keep levels of exposure to radiation “as low as reasonably achievable.”
The rule has led hypercautious regulators to mandate that plants minimize exposure to well below levels that people experience annually from the natural world, such as from the sun. That has forced operators to incorporate concrete shields into their reactor designs, which raise costs and limit how long employees can work at a given time.
The science underpinning the radiation rule is mushy, at best. It’s based on a theory that because radiation poses a serious cancer risk at high doses, it must also pose a low risk at lower doses. But researchers have hotly debated whether this is true, which is hard to measure given how many factors contribute to cancer risk. Meanwhile, coal plants are subject to no standards on radiation, even though they release far greater levels of radioactive material to the public than nuclear plants.
No standard should be a be sacred cow, especially as new designs for advanced reactors promise greater safety. Everyone loses when bureaucrats snuff out nuclear innovation.
— The Washington Post