REGULATION STYMIES NEW ENERGY TECHNOLOGY:

Last week, Georgia Power said that the nuclear fission process has begun inside the Unit 3 reactor at the Vogtle nuclear plant, about 150 miles east of Atlanta. This means that the reactor has achieved “initial criticality,” which is when atoms start to split and produce heat. The company expects the reactor to be fully operational by May or June. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that this is the first time a nuclear reactor has reached this stage since 2015, when the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor in Tennessee began its nuclear reaction.

What the NRC — a federal independent agency that replaced the Atomic Energy Commission in 1975 — failed to mention is that Vogtle Unit 3, once fully operational, will be the first reactor that started with the NRC and moved all the way to completion. So given that track record, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the supposed future of nuclear fission power is taking longer than expected. They promised us small modular reactors, or SMRs, and all we’ve gotten is continually stretched-out timelines.

Which is super disappointing. The selling point of SMRs is that they would be potential solutions to the biggest problems facing traditional nuclear power: speed of construction, cost, size, and safety. In a recent MIT Tech Review piece on SMRs, reporter Casey Crownhart compares Vogtle Units 3 and 4 to the planned SMR from NuScale, which has received a final NRC approval for its reactor design. For instance, the Vogtle units will each have a generation capacity of 1,000 megawatts and sit on 1,000 acres versus NuScale plans for several 100-megawatt reactor modules located on 65 acres.

Creating the NRC was a mistake. Part of the AEC’s mission was promoting nuclear power. The NRC’s mission was simply to regulate it.