> It is, they just also happen to be a major impediment to new Nuclear power in the US.
I'm very pro-nuclear, but I'm glad we have the NRC, and I think they are doing a good job.
I'm currently reading the book "The Curve of Binding Energy" [1], about the physicist Ted Taylor. It was written in 1973 and the focus was the possibility, even likelihood, that one day a terrorist organization could build a nuclear bomb. This was before the split of the Atomic Energy Commission into the NRC and the Department of Energy.
Reading the book is a bit like time travel. You move from today's industry-hostile NRC to the absolute opposite: the AEC was completely industry-captured. The laxity of the controls was terrifying. Of course, the author had no idea that in 6 years we'd have the Three Mile Island incident, but for someone in 2024, TMI now makes perfect sense.
Did the NRC become too much of a break for the nuclear expansion. You bet. But I prefer 100 times more to live in a world like we have now than in a world like it was in 1973. We are very lucky that things worse than TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima didn't happen.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968.The_Curve_Of_Bindi...
I'm very pro-nuclear, but I'm glad we have the NRC, and I think they are doing a good job.
I'm currently reading the book "The Curve of Binding Energy" [1], about the physicist Ted Taylor. It was written in 1973 and the focus was the possibility, even likelihood, that one day a terrorist organization could build a nuclear bomb. This was before the split of the Atomic Energy Commission into the NRC and the Department of Energy.
Reading the book is a bit like time travel. You move from today's industry-hostile NRC to the absolute opposite: the AEC was completely industry-captured. The laxity of the controls was terrifying. Of course, the author had no idea that in 6 years we'd have the Three Mile Island incident, but for someone in 2024, TMI now makes perfect sense.
Did the NRC become too much of a break for the nuclear expansion. You bet. But I prefer 100 times more to live in a world like we have now than in a world like it was in 1973. We are very lucky that things worse than TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima didn't happen.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968.The_Curve_Of_Bindi...