Thread by @MarceloLima

Our nuclear regulator:
- 2,868 employees
- $863m budget
- 47 years in operation
- LICENSE APPROVALS: ZERO

They approved a *design* for a small modular nuclear reactor, and bragged it "only" took 42 months!

It required a 12,000 page application and 2 MILLION pages of "additional documents."

My guess is this application cost *at least* $100 million to put together.

Is it any wonder there has been zero progress in nuclear over the last half century?

Can you imagine spending $100 million and waiting half a decade to find out if your regulator overlord will approve the design of your app?

Before you even begin building it, testing, iterating?

Sure, nuclear power plants aren't apps 😅

BUT the point is that the friction, the barriers to even THINKING about innovation in this space are just crazy.

We need to find a better model.

The only reason nuclear is expensive TODAY is because we can't practice and mass-produce reactors. If we churned these things out like iPhones, they'd be damn cheap. Other countries have shown it's possible (and even they don't mass-produce nuclear reactors)

To learn more:
vox.com/2016/2/29/1113…

And read the chapter "The Atomic Age" in this book:

And watch this recent presentation:

More:

On the crazy costs of getting nuclear reactor designs approved:

“The process is very long, very tedious and very expensive,” says Ross Snuggerud, Nuscale’s chief of engineering operations. “There’s a $1.4bn barrier to getting the design approved that the government’s created.”