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Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias.bsky.social
Look who this "Abundance" review cites for the claim that the regulatory process isn't standing in the way of American nuclear.
May 22, 2025 at 11:58 AM
14 reposts
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The other thing is that this review first says that the correct alternative to the abundance approach is a New Deal model that would be inconsistent with the dictates of the modern procedural state, and then says that actually the New Deal model was bad and needed more proceduralism.
As the author admits here, the whole New Deal thing is a red herring.
Abundance in fact harkens back to key aspects of the older order, in contrast the contemporary hegemony of lawyers, but neo-Brandeisians are committed above all else to the class politics of lawyers.
The nuclear industry has been blaming regulation forever, but it's mostly their own poor performance that is to blame for them being unable to built plants on time and on budget. The price of new US nuclear plants is indeterminate. Nobody can tell you how much they will cost or when they'll operate.
In our 2007 article on the history of nuclear costs in the US we discussed how licensing had been streamlined and that the industry was standardizing on a few designs. Most thought that would kick start new plants. Nope.
Koomey, Jonathan G., and Nathan E. Hultman. 2007. "A reactor-level analysis of busbar costs for U.S. nuclear plants, 1970-2005." Energy Policy. vol. 35, no. 11. November. pp. 5630-5642. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2007.06.005]
The industry also for many years blamed three mile island and the reaction to it for their woes, but this too is not the whole story. There were real safety issues that regulation after TMI addressed. No doubt there was also some bad regs, but those weren't the major factors.
Koomey, Jonathan G., and Nathan E. Hultman. 2007. "A reactor-level analysis of busbar costs for U.S. nuclear plants, 1970-2005." Energy Policy. vol. 35, no. 11. November. pp. 5630-5642. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2007.06.005]
Koomey, Jonathan, and Nathan Hultman. 2011. Was the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 the main cause of US nuclear power's woes? June 24 2011. [https://www.koomey.com/koomey_blog/was-the-three-mile-island-accident-in-1979-the-main-cause-of-us-nuclear-powers-woes-/]
Citing sources helps all readers, not just the person to whom I’m responding directly!
Fair! Anyway thank you. I helped work on a book about nuclear waste storage in 2009 and came away very pessimistic on nuclear power for the reasons you note.
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Sounds like he was more about the "regulatory" bit than he was about the "nuclear" bit...
Isn’t the biggest hurdle to nuclear the financing and lack of risk appetite + lack of scale/supply chains as we don’t build them anymore? You should talk to
I largely agree with the message in abundance, and I don't hold the former Chairman in high esteem. But it's very difficult to point to the regulator as the hangup to new nuclear construction. There's just not a lot of strong evidence for that assertion.
It also only gets a few throwaway lines in the book itself, with very little substantive analysis, especially compared with the other portions of the book.
I agree that the book does not really provide a detailed analysis of the nuclear situation. But it's absurd to quote a guy who did everything in his power as a regulator to kill nuclear projects as an authority on the idea that regulators aren't the issue!
Absolutely agreed on that. And there's definitely blame to be placed on regulators at times.
I just think it's also a stretch to just say the NRC is the biggest issue for nuclear over the past 30 years (not that you did this).
