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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday October 27 2015, @03:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the watch-out-for-the-three-eyed-fish dept.

Late last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its first new operating license in nearly two decades. It was issued to the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has finally completed the Watts Bar 2 reactor over 40 years after work was started on the site. The plant may begin generating electricity before the year is out.

Construction on the site was put on hiatus in 1985, but efforts to complete it were restarted in 2007. After work had restarted, the Fukushima disaster led to significant revisions of the safety regulations in the US; Watts Bar 2 becomes the first plant to meet all these requirements. Its license is good for 40 years.

According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the total cost for completion was $6 billion.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/us-regulators-issue-first-nuclear-plant-operating-license-since-1996/

The NRC's announcement is here. [PDF]


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by iamjacksusername on Tuesday October 27 2015, @11:02AM

    by iamjacksusername (1479) on Tuesday October 27 2015, @11:02AM (#255046)

    " 40 years too late, billions over budget, and licensed by an agency that really couldn't say NO, was done by, wait for it..... Big Government"

    To be fair, once Three Mile Island happened, new nuclear construction was completely stopped. Environmental groups rode the wave of public outrage and the approval pipeline was effectively closed. Any reactor application not already in the pipeline was effectively shut out. This was a political decision... nuclear did not have the lobby money of the oil companies on the both sides of the aisle and was being actively lobbied against by the green wing of the democratic party. The nuclear industry did not have a well funded political organization to back it up.

    From a political standpoint, President Bush (43) re-started the NRC approval machinery with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which had been, for all practical purposes, frozen since the Carter administration. From that standpoint, this reactor went from complete standstill on construction in 2005 (though the initial design approvals has been given in the 70s and preliminary construction had already begun) to approval in 2007 which is pretty much ludicrous speed when it comes to the NRC. They were not going to restart the whole process with a new design that had not been approved... this design is old but it is an already approved design. Had they restarted with a more modern design, it would be another 10 years (at best) before construction could even be started again.

    As far as costs, the nuclear industry is the most regulated industry in the US (healthcare may be more regulated these days but who knows now). So, like anything else, these things take time. Because construction had been halted for so long, a lot of expertise, both bureaucratic and technical, to navigate the approval and construction process has been aging out of the industry. The only real American nuclear technician training program is the US Navy which has almost nothing in common with civilian nuclear bureaucratic processes. It takes years to train people; you need a pipeline of supporting manufacturing processes. You cannot just source a bolt from some supplier - you need paperwork showing that the bolt is rated for nuclear reactor use. The US will need years of regular construction to rebuild the expertise pipeline and manufacturing sources to achieve any economy of scale; until then, every reactor is going to be an expensive endeavor.

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