This is the case for all public works projects. The red-tape overhead is crazy. Regulation is necessary but the bureaucratic maze that has to be negotiated is a huge problem. I worked on a public rail system and the down-time waiting for permission on everything was draining.

Damn, if only we didn't have to build them safely we could make them so cheaply.

Safety and bureaucracy are orthogonal. Bureaucracy is a slowing force, which is sold as being correlated with safety. The more layers of abstraction needlessly added, the more likely there will be systems engineering failures.

>more layers of abstraction needlessly added

I think you're betraying your bias here with the added term "needlessly". There is some (maybe even most) bureaucracy that is inefficiently applied, for sure. But it is meant to address some risk. Maybe it's a risk that you (personally) don't care about, or aren't even cognizant of, and that's when it becomes easy to declare it "needless." We should be looking to streamline our risk mitigation and align it with risks that the public cares about, not throw it out altogether.

You're betraying your bias by insinuating I suggested throwing out risk mitigation. I advocated for streamlined risk mitigation by highlighting the risk of unnecessary complexity.

Maybe you can point me to where you advocated for risk mitigation. Because you seemed to imply bureaucracy is sold as risk-mitigation under the mistaken assumption that it correlates with safety. Did I read it incorrectly and you are actually saying there is a truly positive correlation between safety and bureaucracy? Or maybe you have an opinion on what we should replace the current version with?

Now you only need to get expert consensus on which parts of the complexity are unnecessary.

That sounds an awful lot like industry standards and codes, which are often eschewed as the very bureaucracy the OP was railing against.

A true expert can streamline their industry every time. Simply because most people who make decisions on process are not experts in the relevant field, but expert administrators who often lazily apply existing policies to new concepts that they never got the training to understand or put into context.

Just look at any institutional review board: the breadth their expertise is always smaller than the relevant topics they will have to rule upon at the institution, and often that leads to a certain level of consternation, misplaced understanding of risk, and overall higher levels of inefficiency.

I have worked in a highly regulated industry before. I found the regulations that concerned me (safety critical software) to be quite good and rather too lax than too strict. I would be surprised if you could streamline nuclear power plant regulations by a lot without using losing safety.

OK, so then we just need to figure out how to identify a true expert and we're off to the races.

They are subject to a regulatory ratchet that almost guarantees that you won't make a profit. I.e. if a new safety measure becomes "economically feasible" because you increased cost efficiency somewhere else then regulators would adjust their calculations in the future and make additional requirements because they would now be feasible. This can even lead to requirements changing during the construction time of a plant and require expensive retrofits.

https://freopp.org/rethinking-u-s-nuclear-energy-regulation-...

We build planes safely, but those same parts are 3x the cost. Safety isn’t the reason why it’s more expensive.

Renewables kill orders of magnitude more people (just look at how many die from falling when installing wind turbines, it's not pretty) and render orders of magnitude more land uninhabitable. We have ludicrous double standards when it comes to safety.

I think these are baldfaced lies, especially the first claim. Justify, please.

First google result: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... . (Most renewable production is still hydro, so yes, it really is over 10x more deaths from renewables).

You explicitly said wind turbines, which your own reference shows are not "orders of magnitude" more dangerous. Thanks for destroying your own claim.

I said "Renewables kill orders of magnitude more people" and I was right. My post is right there, lol, ironic that you wanted to talk about "baldfaced lies".

Regulation is actually not a large driver for nuclear project cost overruns according to this MIT study: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

if that were the case, the prc, the us navy, and the russian navy would be mostly or completely nuclear-powered