Lea Booth

It's real: Indian Point nuclear plant can run again. Call it a Rebuild rather than a Restart. Containment dome cuts might be the easiest thing. No tensioning so just patch the hole and you're good to go. Turbines are ready to go. Hardest may be the reactor heads and internals. Need to order new heads from Korea or Japan. In total: as short as four years and in the best case a few billion dollars each. Call it $10b for as much as $20 billion in market value of electricity over the next twenty years of plant life post rebuild. Indian Point could then run for decades longer than that. I'm convinced. This needs to happen.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides a powerful legal barrier against antinuclear forces in the USA who seek to delay and destroy nuclear energy through legal uncertainty. But now the NRC is under full-scale attack from a bunch of folks who don't seem to understand the crucial role the NRC plays in protecting nuclear energy from endless, arbitrary legal attack and investment-killing uncertainty. Just a few minutes ago Republican Annie Caputo, perhaps the most pro-industry NRC commissioner of them all, resigned. @AlexCKaufman has the scoop. Caputo apparently resigned rather than be compromised by politics of NRC independence destruction. The NRC helps ensure that there is only a tiny, extremely tough attack surface for antinuclear legal efforts to target. Running a reactor for 60 years? 80 years? There is very little that antinukes can do to stop it when the NRC says yes (and the NRC has agreed with its engineers and has said yes over and over). Balkanizing nuclear regulation by handing it over to overworked and unqualified national or state-level bureaucrats and politicians radically expands nuclear's legal attack surface while making it thin and penetrable. If I were at the Sierra Club or another antinuclear lobbying organization, I'd be delighted by the openings to attack nuclear energy this creates. You don't have to win your lawsuit against nuclear, you only have to delay it and add uncertainty to kill off a nuclear plant project. This was the playbook that the NRC killed off over time. Does the NRC need to be reformed? Yes! Can it move faster? Yes! And this reform was happening and so is the speed-up. I've not met any serious, seasoned pro-nuclear expert who doesn't agree. But not a single one thinks the Commission itself should be politized or eliminated. The NRC in the past has sharply limited the influence of antinuclear politicians from hurting nuclear. Texas, for example, is attacking the NRC both from a "pro-nuclear" AND an antinuclear position! And we want to trust Texas non-technical lawyers and politicians to not abuse their nuclear power to hurt nuclear if it's politically expedient, as is happening now by trying to block a spent fuel storage facility? And the vast majority of delays in developing and deploying new nuclear reactors have causes OTHER than the NRC. Developing nuclear reactors that function well is really hard! Building nuclear plants is hard! Blaming the NRC from the outside is easier than learning nuclear engineering or deployment history! I hate seeing the current nuclear renaissance be jeopardized by ill-considered attacks on perhaps the most nuclear-friendly major regulator in the world. I work on nuclear energy around the world and though the NRC isn't perfect, for those of us who love nuclear energy and want to expand it, it's better than pretty much any other regulator in a democracy. I will be speaking out more publicly about this attack on nuclear energy's legal basis in the USA and I ask those who know the truth about this issue but who have not spoken out publicly to make your voices heard.