Technology

"Your story does nothing to convince me that the industry is regulated to "strangle" it. You don't say what the pipe did"

The point of that story is to illustrate the gross inefficiency and bureaucracy of engineering design changes in the nuclear regulatory cycle. What the pipe did doesn't matter as much as how regulators chose to approach the problem. They effectively wasted months of manpower and materials for nothing.

That to me is strangulation of an industry. Another is how the Obama administration handled Yucca mountain and how the federal government, by law, owns all the uranium and is thus legally responsible for its disposal.

No real movement has been made on this front by the NRC and is the main cause of why we have all our spent fuel sitting on concrete outside of the plant instead of a long term geological repository.

It came out of the ground, so just dig under the water table into the bed rock and leave it there.

"Completely different scale of responsibility"

And completely different scale of power generation. Nuclear plants are far more power dense, and that is the ultimate factor in "potential danger". Solar is great for places that we have already developed but are underutilized, like roof tops or farms, but they aren't going to power an arc furnace or a manufacturing facility or a data center. The power simply isn't there vs. The land cost that would be required for it would be astronomical.

Nuclear and " renewables " are two different tools for the same toolbox. One shouldn't be excluded over the other because both are extremely beneficial. The "green" infighting only serves the fossil fuel lobby.