Nuclear cowboys slashing safety regulation threaten to derail the energy industry

What really thwarts the energy sector is not environmental rules but political indecision

JUST as nuclear energy is coming back into public favour, along comes something nobody wants: a new wave of nuclear cowboys bent on tearing up the safety rules, senior industry figures fear.

Venture capital money has begun to target the nuclear sector, bringing with it the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things”. Impatient and litigious, these companies are suing to weaken the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). They’ve found an ally in a new wave of policy influencers who say regulators slow things down too much by gold-plating the safety specifications. They point to thousands of design changes required at Hinkley Point C, adding billions to the cost.

But while smarter and simpler environmental changes are needed to rid us of lawfare and the notorious fish discos, slashing away at safety rules puts confidence in the sector at risk.

Some of the newcomers don’t exactly inspire confidence. One litigant, Valar Atomics, was the subject of a scathing investigative report recently. Its co-founder claimed someone could hold one of its spent fuel rods for five minutes without trouble, a statement rubbished by nuclear scientists who calculated a fatal dose would be administered within milliseconds. This new wave of Silicon Valley-style nuclear start-ups are supported by well-funded lobbyists with roots in the effective altruism movement, rationalist forums and its offshoot, “progress studies”. They include the Centre for British Progress, a new think tank, and Works In Progress, a newsletter. These organisations take an arguably indiscriminate and unsubtle approach to regulation: where there are rules, they must be rolled back. The Centre for British Progress, for instance, has led the campaign to dismantle UK copyright law, a vital economic sector and source of UK soft power, regarding it as an impediment to the development of artificial intelligence. Just as crudely, they regard nuclear safety as just another piece of red tape.

“The radiation health arguments Works in Progress have chosen are not going to hold up scientifically,” says Mark Nelson, founder of Radiant Energy. Nelson is a nuclear advocate but he argues that the new disruptors don’t really understand what they’re disrupting, and veteran engineers echo his view.

The reason to pay attention to the industry boffins is that taming the atom is a unique challenge. A modern nuclear reactor is the most complex machine that humans have ever created and extreme engineering requires extreme safety, down to the last nut and bolt. In 1988, researchers ran an F-4 Phantom jet fighter into a concrete reactor shell at 500mph, and it barely left a scratch. Today, a plant can withstand a direct hit from an airliner. This is reassuring. A civilian nuclear programme needs both the consent of the public and strong political support, which is not a given when the fanatical anti-nuclear green lobby will scaremonger and invoke doomsday. A rigorous safety regime assures politicians and the public that the risk can be managed.

The results should speak for themselves. Thanks to safety requirements that critics complain are unnecessarily gold-plated, nuclear has the lowest death toll of any energy industry. Reactors are so robust their lifespan has been extended safely for decades. And the capacity factor, or uptime, of a reactor is by far the highest: over 90pc, compared to 35.4pc for wind and 24.9pc for solar.

It’s also what makes nuclear attractive again. Pension funds are now warming to long-term nuclear investments, and don’t want the instability that the disruptors are creating, says Nelson. Yes, the cost of regulation is high but the amount spent on obtaining a licence is trivial once amortised over many decades.

The ripples of this nuclear culture war have now washed up on our shores. The Government’s Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce shared its first thoughts on how to reform red tape last week. Most are sensible. Sources familiar with the taskforce’s thinking assured me that “this can’t be a cowboy industry.” The taskforce is looking at bureaucratic simplification rather than safety regulation, I’m told, so there are fewer overlaps and points of contact. Perhaps the UK’S globally respected safety process, the GDA (Generic Design Assessment), can be simplified without opening the door to shoddy parts and sloppy procedures.

In reality, what really thwarts nuclear energy is political indecision, more so than the environmental rules. Whitehall dithering and Treasury hostility deter capital. In the 2010s, the UK rapidly approved designs for reactors made by Hitachi and Westinghouse, but nothing was ever built because the costs looked so steep. Even in a national energy crisis, the quick fix was fracking new gas.

We must make our programme more ambitious, enabling mass production of nuclear reactors as the French did in the 1970s. What investors need is regulatory confidence.

Trust is hard to win and easy to lose. All it takes is one leak, or one accident, and the green blob will ensure we’re back to square one, perhaps for decades. The new nuclear cowboys and the naive, effective altruist-aligned wonks pose a far bigger threat to the revival of nuclear, and our future prosperity, than safety rules do. They just don’t know it.