Comment by Matticus_Rex

No one is saying there shouldn't be regulations on nuclear.

But our regulations on nuclear are utterly insane -- every time I get someone to read into the reasons nuclear here has been so much more expensive than safe nuclear in other countries with more reasonable regulations around it, they come away shellshocked. It takes a while to understand what's going on, because it's truly death by a thousand cuts, but the unifying principle is the NRC's ALARA ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable") principle (with honorable mention going to the NRC's Linear No-Threshold harm model, which despite the evidence assigns a linear cancer incidence to radiation dosing).

Getting radiation exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" sounds like a nice idea. But there's no lower bound, so the costs scale infinitely, gutting the incentives to innovate and invest. If the prices of other forms of energy go up, regulators intentionally raise the costs of nuclear comparably by increasing what must be spent on reducing radiation exposure. New innovative plant design that increases margins? Guess what -- that's another opportunity to use the money to lower radiation exposure even further.

The lack of a lower bound results in absurd results, because we long ago decreased the exposure from plants to far below background radiation levels, and far below the levels at which we've been able to observe harm.

We need to replace the LNT model with a sigmoid model that aligns with the science on radiation harms, and we need to remove the infinitely-scaling ALARA standard. Doing these will not increase risks, but will decrease costs a large amount in the short run and even more in the longer-term.