New NRA Draft and New NRA Exegesis

A new draft of the Nuclear Reorganization Act(NRA) has been uploaded to the Flop book site. This version of the NRA is pretty much a complete rewrite. The biggest changes are:

a) Waives NEPA for nuclear plants.

b) Repeals Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The new policy is dry cask storage until the valuable isotopes can be economically extracted, then Class C landfill the rest.

c) Outlaws dense-packing of spent fuel pools. Plants have five years to go to open-racking.

d) Simplifies NAB arbitration process.

e) Moves Nuclear Investigation Board to the NTSB and changes name to Office of Nuclear Investigation to match NTSB organization chart.

The GKG has also posted a new version of the UCert Manual to the Flop book site. This is a complete rewrite. All the motivational verbiage including the history of US nuclear and the argument for SNT has been removed. This stuff has been superseded by the We Can Make Nuclear Cheap Again book. The manual now assumes the user has read the MNCA book and understands the need to replace a tragically misguided regulatory process. The only question is how.

The manual is now largely a 50 page explanation of the Nuclear Reorganization Act(NRA) including the reasoning behind each section, and the arguments for the proposed values that the NRA requires Congress to select. To reflect this, the title of the manual has been unimaginatively changed to The Nuclear Reorganization Act. The UCert label has been downplayed, and the role of the Nuclear Arbitration Board in resolving disputes between the regulators and the industry accentuated. But the fundamentals have not changed. The NRA

1) requires Congress to mandate a biologically sound, radiation exposure compensation program, and

2) uses the insurance market to balance benefit and risk given Congress’s valuation of risk.

Unless we end up with a regulatory system that works with human nature, rather than pretending that GS-15’s are philosopher kings, the auto-genocidal tragedy that is US nuclear power will continue to be inflicted on the poor and the planet.