avidiax 8 hours ago

I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.

This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.

Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.

A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.

Reply View 1 reply
  • epistasis 8 hours ago

    Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing.

    Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.

    Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.

    The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.

    Reply View 0 replies