A Nuclear Revival Needs More Rules, Not Less

Analysis by David Fickling | Bloomberg, April 19, 2023

“…………………………………………….. It’s popular to blame environmentalists for the way atomic power stopped growing in rich countries three decades ago. Too many protests and consequent safety regulations have made it impossible to build nuclear power plants (the argument goes) slowing what should be an easy path to decarbonizing our economies. Clear away the red tape, and the market will do the rest.

Look at the long and painful histories of Vogtle and Olkiluoto, however, and it becomes clear that the truth is close to the opposite. It’s not simply a surfeit of regulations, but more importantly the deregulation of energy markets that has stifled atomic power in recent decades.

Atomic power facilities are, by their nature, megaprojects. …………………. Even in a best-case scenario, nuclear plants take the best part of a decade and billions of dollars to build, followed by further decades before they’ve paid for themselves.

Almost every other megaproject we construct depends on coordinated government support, if not outright ownership, because only states or protected monopolies have the capacity to take on the financial and operational risks. That was the case for power, too, during the nuclear boom from 1970 to 1990, when monopolistic utilities in Europe, North America and the former Soviet Union constructed plants with little regard to cost or even demand.

Those risks have only been heightened by the way that western countries have deregulated energy markets since the 1990s, exposing multi-decade nuclear projects to the vagaries of volatile pricing rather than the fixed returns that they once expected. It’s no coincidence that the nuclear construction boom has lasted longest in Asian and former Soviet countries where state-backed monopolies and managed power pricing still hold sway.

While being ostensibly private-sector projects, Vogtle and Olkiluoto both underline this point. The former was only finished thanks to some $12 billion of loan guarantees from the US government. VC Summer, an almost identical plant across the state border in South Carolina that ran into simultaneous difficulties when their common contractor Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in 2017, failed to attract funding from Washington and was abandoned. The key ultimate shareholder in Olkiluoto, meanwhile, is not a profit-maximizing investor, but a cooperative of local power users. ………………..

Sticking to boring but familiar water-cooled reactor designs, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with fast neutron or small modular reactors, is the best way of ensuring that projects come in closer to time and budget plans…………https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/04/19/nuclear-power-a-renaissance-will-need-more-regulation-not-less/6edbff46-df00-11ed-a78e-9a7c2418b00c_story.html