> How about this, why don't SK, UK, French and US regulators get together and agree on a common set of regulations for reactor design. Then they can focus on the site specific regulations unique to each installation.
How does that benefit the groups funding major candidates in the US? I don't know about the other countries but you can be confident that the amount of red tape involved in reactor construction in the US is not a bug but a feature to many of those responsible for it.
Nuclear power is generally stable and predictable which reduces potential peak prices, but it doesn't scale down well so having a lot of it during times of low load means off peak prices will fall. Expansion of nuclear power thus threatens the profit margins of a lot of powerful organizations.
---
See also: Cars. It is not technically possible to produce a single light passenger vehicle that can be legally registered without modification anywhere in the world.
The US's Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the UNECE Global Technical Regulations that apply in much of the rest of the world are incompatible in a few ways that mostly relate to lighting/reflectors and crash structures. As a result, every "world car" offered in all major markets in fact has at least two and usually three variants, typically UNECE LHD, UNECE RHD, and FMVSS LHD.
This wouldn't be particularly hard to solve by either updating one or the other to be compatible or by the US accepting UNECE LHD vehicles, but the existing automakers that sell around the world have no interest in making it easier for others to compete.
How does that benefit the groups funding major candidates in the US? I don't know about the other countries but you can be confident that the amount of red tape involved in reactor construction in the US is not a bug but a feature to many of those responsible for it.
Nuclear power is generally stable and predictable which reduces potential peak prices, but it doesn't scale down well so having a lot of it during times of low load means off peak prices will fall. Expansion of nuclear power thus threatens the profit margins of a lot of powerful organizations.
---
See also: Cars. It is not technically possible to produce a single light passenger vehicle that can be legally registered without modification anywhere in the world.
The US's Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the UNECE Global Technical Regulations that apply in much of the rest of the world are incompatible in a few ways that mostly relate to lighting/reflectors and crash structures. As a result, every "world car" offered in all major markets in fact has at least two and usually three variants, typically UNECE LHD, UNECE RHD, and FMVSS LHD.
This wouldn't be particularly hard to solve by either updating one or the other to be compatible or by the US accepting UNECE LHD vehicles, but the existing automakers that sell around the world have no interest in making it easier for others to compete.