Is there a third way?
Figure 1. The Star Chamber. This 16th Century tribunal was more balanced than the NRC.
There is a fundamental difference between engineers and lawyers in the way they think. Engineers are taught from day one everything is a trade off. Every design is a balance of cost, function, safety, etc. Your job is to come up with a good balance.
Lawyers on the other hand are taught from day one that everything's a conflict. The way you resolve these conflicts is to have the two sides argue it out and see who wins. This requires a third party arbiter: a jury, or judge, to make that decision.
The original Atomic Energy Commission was based on the engineering paradigm. But thanks to fear of radiation stoked by anti-nuclear weapons groups led by the Rockefeller Foundation, we decided to abandon that model. We set up a conflict between the promotional side of the AEC, which became the Department of Energy, and the nuclear safety side, which became the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
We went to the legal model. But we left out one essential feature: the third party arbiter. We gave the safety side the final decision. It's a court in which the prosecution decides on the verdict. To make it even worse, the prosecution writes the laws and can change those laws whenever it feels like it. And if there's a need to interpret those laws, the prosecution is also the judge. We set up an all-powerful tribunal whose only rule is we set the rules and told them to prevent a release.
The resulting tragically unbalanced, lopsided "conflict" quickly led to the mess we are in. Any solution must have an inherent balancing mechanism. I can think of only two possibilities:
1) An entity which is responsible for both providing reliable, affordable electricity, and doing this with an acceptable level of risk.
2) A reactive system in which the provider of electricity is forced to pay for any harm he causes.
My question is: can anybody come up with a third alternative? Remember: it has to have a built in balancing mechanism. The decisionmaker must incur a real penalty for both over-weighting safety and under-weighting safety. Good intentions and platitudes do not count.