Confidentia Salutatis Publicae

NuScale SMR

Amici, Americani, Compatriotae,

The title of this blog post is "The Assurance of Public Safety." As discussed in yesterday's post, NuScale Hand Delivers 12,000-Page SMR Application To NRC:

Next generation nuclear power plant developer NuScale has requested a regulatory review of its small modular reactor (SMR) design for commercial application, submitting its nearly 12,000-pages of SMR plans to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the company announced Thursday.

It must have taken three to four years for NuScale to get to this point in its design for a small modular passively safe nuclear reactor. And now it will take a few months for the US NRC to decide on whether or not to even accept this application, let alone review it. Then once it decides to review the application, that process will take up to two years and involve thousands if not tens of thousands of requests for additional information. Then once NuScale answers all of those questions to the satisfaction of whoever in the US NRC is doing the asking, it will take the US NRC another two or so years to write its safety evaluation in order to conclude that this design is safe to build. Our civil servant has become our civil master.

In the meantime tens of thousands of people within the United States will die from the after effects of pollution off fossil fuel. While the US NRC acts in an obstructionist fashion regarding the construction and operation of a pollution-free source of electrical power, fossil fuel will kill tens of thousands. You don't believe me? Then behold the Number of Deaths per Terawatt Hour by Power Source:

Deaths per Terawatt Hour by Energy Source

Now tell me, cari amici, what is at the bottom of the list in number of fatalities per terawatt hour? Do you see nuclear at 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour, but natural gas (which is what will be used to replace 2000 MWe from Governor Andy Cuomo's shutdown of IPEC) is 20 deaths per terawatt hour? That's a 500 fold increase in fatalities! Why is that acceptable to the Federal Government but new nuclear generation must go through a mind-numbing amount of dissection and inspection before permission can be granted to even start building the first new plant? New gas fired generation doesn't go through nearly this amount of safety reviews and it is demonstrably UNSAFE.

Wind Turbine Fire

Yet eco-activists will then point out that solar and wind should be used instead. Let us momentarily disregard the fact that an abysmal capacity factor of less than 30% alone makes that proposal ludicrous - every new solar station, every new wind farm is a new gas turbine facility providing spinning reserve backup for 70% of the time that there is no sunlight, no wind. Let us instead consider just safety. From the chart above there are 0.1 deaths per terawatt hour for solar and 0.15 deaths per terawatt hour for wind. Those figures constitute an increase in the rate of fatalities by 2.5 and 3.75 respectively over nuclear energy's fatality rate of 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour. Thus well earned is the epithet of green power, black death.

Confidentia Salutatis Publicae - that is demonstrably what the US NRC does NOT do. It's time to change the Regulator. President -elect Donald Trump has stated that for every new regulation which a Federal agency enacts, two old ones must be removed. That policy alone would prove to be a boon for nuclear energy. It is time to level the regulatory playing field. All purveyors of energy must be held to the same standard as nuclear. If you can't get your fatality rate down to nuclear's level, then you get appropriately penalized. If you can't sequester your releases of pollution as nuclear has to sequester its releases of radioactivity, then you get appropriately penalized. And no government funding for any source of energy without distinction - let the free market work under a levelized regulatory playing field. And guess what, cari amici? Nuclear will win hands down every time. Every single time.