‘New Nuclear” lobby wants to weaken USA’s safety regulations

 What  a con!

Even if they did get rid of the safety regulations, ‘new nuclear’ wouldn’t be ready in time to affect climate change.

And that’s even if ‘new nuclear’ could affect climate change. Which it can’t.. The Nuke lobby conveniently forgets the entire chain from mining to waste burial – all of which is highly greenhouse gas emitting.

The ‘new nuke’ lobby pretends they’ve solved the radioactive trash problem, which they haven’t.

The sad part is –  all that money going to a dead end technology –  when it could be furthering good design, energy efficiency, and renewable energy development.

Allison Macfarlane sounds like  a person of integrity. I bet that the new nuke, and the old nuke lobbies were glad to have her off the head of the NRC.

Advanced Nuclear Industry to Regulators: Give Us a Chance, MIT Technology Review, Richard Martin, October 13, 2015 Entrepreneurs argue that reactor technology innovation is limited by regulatory barriers. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has licensed one new nuclear plant in the last 35 years. Yet there are now nearly 50 companies in the U.S. and Canada researching and developing advanced nuclear power technologies, according to Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization focused on energy, climate change, and national security. These companies are backed by more than $1.3 billion in private capital from individual investors like Bill Gates and from major venture capital funds .

Several of those companies were on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week for the Solve Conference , participating in a workshop called “Building a Scalable, Safe New Nuclear Reactor Design.” Among the companies represented were Transatomic Power, TerraPower, Moltex Energy, Tri-Alpha Energy, and Terrestrial Energy.

Several of those companies were on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week for the Solve Conference , participating in a workshop called “Building a Scalable, Safe New Nuclear Reactor Design.” Among the companies represented were Transatomic Power, TerraPower, Moltex Energy, Tri-Alpha Energy, and Terrestrial Energy.

Many of these new entrants view the NRC’s prolonged and expensive licensing process as a barrier to innovation. It can take a decade or more, and hundreds of millions of dollars, just to get a license for a prototype reactor from the NRC.

This, says Allison MacFarlane, who was NRC chairman from 2012 to 2015 and is now the director of the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University, is the way it should be. The long time lines, safety concerns, and high capital cost of building nuclear plants all require a regulatory process that is thorough, painstaking, and costly. “Nuclear is a different beast,” MacFarlane said at Solve……

The undermanned NRC has indeed embarked on a reform program, but unfortunately it’s not the sort of reform the advanced reactor community is seeking…..a February NRC presentation on Project Aim 2020, the agency’s internal strategic plan, foresees that the number of new reactors seeking licenses will be “down significantly” by 2020.  …

MacFarlane is unmoved. “The problem is not the NRC,” she said at the conference. “It’s the economics” of nuclear power.

She has a point. As long as the price of power from natural gas plants hovers at all-time lows, it will be hard for any form of new nuclear reactors to be built….. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542411/advanced-nuclear-industry-to-regulators-give-us-a-chance/

October 14, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA