The political feasibility of UCert.
Figure 1. Failed Attempt to AI Generate a MANA Hat. The closest I could come up with was a mushroom cloud emanating out of somebody’s head.
Only a crisis --- actual or perceived --- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That I believe is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.[Milton Friedman, 1982]
Even for long time supporters of nuclear, the GKG solution to the Gordian Knot, the deregulation of nuclear power, which we call Underwriter Certification (UCert) is an eye roller. Some of these people assume UCert is some sort of Trumpian negotiating ploy to induce "real reform" at the NRC, although they have only the vaguest idea of what that "real reform" looks like. Others just back away slowly, avoiding eye contact.
I ask these people "Do you believe the Intolerable Harm Lie?" They assure me they do not. But the preacher knows what's in the choir's cute little brains. The dozen or so neurons therein are struggling to come up with the "radiation's not as bad as the nuclear establishment anti-nukes claim" pattern. Even replacing "anti-nukes" with "nuclear establishment" is beyond the capability of these highly indoctrinated cells.
The first requirement is you must believe the Intolerable Harm Lie is really false. You must believe that even a Chernobyl-sized release, properly handled, is no worse than a bad commercial air line crash. You must believe that, given adequate buffer zones, evacuation will almost never be required, even in large releases. It certainly was not required at Fukushima, a very large release indeed. You must believe that only the 50,000 people closest to Chernobyl Unit 4 should have even thought about evacuating. And if the moms did evacuate, they and their kids could and should have returned in matter of weeks. If you don't believe these facts, stop here.
Go back and study The Two Lies piece. Reread the chapters on Chernobyl and Fukushima in the Flop book. Don't come back until you are convinced the Intolerable Harm Lie is really false.
OK, you're back. The IHL is really false. We've got adequate buffers zones around all our plants. You agree there's no medical reason we can't regulate nuclear power in much the same manner as we regulate refineries and chemical plants, which by the way have killed far more members of the public than nuclear plants. See Oppau. See Texas City. See Beirut. See Bhopal.
The only anti-UCert argument you have left is political feasibility. I submit that UCert is far more politically feasible than what DOGE is attempting. No Congressman is going to vote to cut federal funds from his district unless he thinks that doing so is more likely to get him reelected than not doing so. Even for Trump and his threats to primary that's a very tall order.
UCert requires rewriting only one law. The only agency we need to get rid of is the NRC. That's basically affects just one congressional district, Maryland 8 (Rockville). Maryland 8's congressman is Jamie Raskin. I doubt if Mr. Raskin will vote for anything Trump suggests under any circumstances.
If Trump wanted to, he could pull it off. He could use the bully pulpit to convince the people they have been lied to. Nobody can do that better. Nobody. He could rant on about the liars, awful people, truly awful people, with some justification if people are judged by their impact. The people that are being fired aren't coming to work anyway. They're losers. They're all losers. He's just returning power to the states. That's what the founders wanted. Nuclear power to the states. It's in the Constitution. The states that don't want nuclear, they're losers. They're all losers. Let'em freeze in the dark. The others will enter a golden age, like never before, building beautiful nuclear plants, hundreds of beautiful plants, so beautiful you would not believe. Make America Nuclear Again.
The truth about nuclear is Good News. Most people, not all, like Good News. It could happen.
Unfortunately, there's no evidence that Trump is interested in nuclear. His top enforcer is a battery salesman, who pushed out the only person in the Trump entourage who has suggested getting rid of the NRC. I guess we will have to wait for the Big Black Out. In which case see Friedman quote above. We need to make sure UCert is lying around.
In the comments to my facebook post sharing this article, I got “I stopped reading when I read ‘environmental buffer zone’, since I can’t un-remember Chernobyl and all the death & illness suffered by the surrounding population.” I asked for a citation for those outcomes and got this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster
The lede reads as follows:
“In a 2009 United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) study, the Chernobyl accident had by 2005 caused 61,200 man-Sv of radiation exposure to recovery workers and evacuees, 125,000 man-Sv to the populace of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, and a dose to most other European countries amounting to 115,000 man-Sv. The report estimated a further 25% more exposure would be received from residual radioisotopes after 2005.[4] The global collective dose from Chernobyl was earlier estimated by UNSCEAR in 1988 to be "600,000 man Sv, equivalent on average to 21 additional days of world exposure to natural background radiation."[5]”
Does Wikipedia simply blow off “dose rate” here?
The new DOE secretary issued a Secretarial Order that is quite supportive of nuclear energy.
What secretary or group of secretaries would have to issue orders to make compliance through Ucert possible? What exactly would those orders say? If you don't write them, someone else will - and they'll probably get it wrong.