Blame the Crew

I spent 30 years running big tankers. It's a wild business with precipitous ups and downs. But there was one thing you could always count on. When things did not go well, the crew got blamed. In most tanker casualties, the crew made one or more mistakes. The investigation always focused on those mistakes. And then stopped. A crew screw up means we don't have to look into the culpability of the owner that provided the under-sized crew with a lousy, poorly maintained ship. Often we blamed the victim, rather that the perp.

Something similar has happened in nuclear. It's called blame the contractor. Since the mid-70's the performance of builders of US nuclear power plants has been dreadful. The plants take two or more times longer to build than they should, end up costing four to eight times what they should, and often perform very poorly, at least in the first year or two after start up. Clearly, the builders are messing up. But the real question is why?

Companies like Siemens, GE, Doosan, Mitsubishi build a full range of power plants: coal, gas, and nuke. They have no trouble building the first two on time and on schedule. They will offer you a turnkey contract if you like. But they can't build a nuclear plant, at least not in the US, without blundering.

In the 1960's, companies like the above and others such as Combustion Engineering and Babock and Wilcox shifted seamlessly from building coal plants to building nuke plants, and back. It was a natural. They required the same skills. You pour concrete, bend metal, and pull wire. You need construction workers, welders, fitters, machinists, and electricians. There was no such thing as coal plant skills, or nuclear plant skills. Rather quickly the contractors were building nuclear plants for nearly the same cost as coal plants. But we are told the builders have now lost the skills required to build a nuclear plant. What special skills would those be?

But not too worry. As soon as we start building lots of nuclear plants, those obscure skills will be relearned and the cost of the plants will come tumbling down. We've seen this process in the past. Through the 60's and into the 70's, these people built scores of nuclear plants, gained lots of the special skills required. Build times shot up, costs skyrocketed, and screws up mushroomed. Whatever these special skills are, maybe they aren't all that helpful?

Enough of this nonsense. There are no special technical skills. With the possible exception of the reactor itself, which is a tiny portion of the plant, everything's pretty much the same. Even the pressure vessels are just thicker versions of non-nuclear components.

If there are any special skills, they are in navigating the maze of regulations, keeping your paperwork clean, schmoozing omnipotent NRC inspectors, and trying to guess/influence what the next change in the rules will be. These are not skills that lead to better, cheaper plants.

It's time we stop fooling ourselves. The difference between coal plant contractor performance and nuclear plant contractor performance is the regulatory system. If you don't change the regulatory system, nuclear contractor performance will get worse, not better,