Comment by epistasis

> The lack of regulatory clarity

Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.

Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):

> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.

China is building US and EU designs of reactors at a fraction of the costs in the US and Europe.

Your examples of regulatory asterisks are on the design side of things. I don't think that the cost of capital for Vogtle & Summer in the US, or Flamanville and Olkiluoto in the EU, were excessively high. As for your 3rd point, there were tons of adjustments during the build of Vogtle, which is a big reason for its large cost overruns. Regulation didn't necessitate those changes, they were all construction bungles.

Which I think leads to your point 2, construction competence, being the primary cause, which aligns with everything else I have read on the subject. For example, another poster pointed to this paper:

> We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations.

You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.

Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.

If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.

We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China.

I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.

I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.

Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.

That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.

Which regulations?

What would change in the construction process?

China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?

I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."

It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.

I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.

Nuclear regulations are no worse than aviation regulation. Yet planes manage to be cost competitive.

Cutting regulations isn't necessary the win people think. If safety regulations are cut, it risks accidents in future.

Nuclear needs to move from bespoke builds to serial production.

But what are the specific regulations you would cut, dude?

If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.

I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!

As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.

If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.

Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.

Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.