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States and Startups Are Suing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Critics of the NRC say its red tape and lengthy authorization timelines stifle innovation, but handing some of its responsibilities to states could undermine public trust and the industry’s safety record.
Some nuclear advocates say that the US’s regulation system, which imposes cumbersome requirements and ultra-long timelines on projects, is largely to blame for this delay—especially when it comes to developing new designs for smaller reactors—and that some reactors should be taken from the NRC’s purview altogether. NuScale did lose valuable time and money on a cumbersome regulatory process—but its energy was also competing in price against gas and renewables, which are, on average, cheaper than nuclear power from plants that have been running for decades. (Taylor told WIRED that Valar is working on a “thorough analysis” in response that will be public in a few weeks and that the initial claims around the spent fuel were simply “a thought experiment we did for our own internal illustration purposes” and not part of the lawsuit materials.)
Or read this on Wired
