I mean that doesn't sound like very big hurdles. It is an inspection of a completed reactor to make sure it wasn't managed and built like trash. Every factory and business and powerplant is subject to an inspection before it can operate. Even most residentual homes require an inspection before people can live in it.
It is what typically all reactors get stuck on for years - or often decades.
I doubt it.
There used to be separate construction and operating permits, and sometimes you got the building permit, built the plant and then never got the operating license.
This has now been streamlined with a combined construction/operating license. If you built what you promised to build, you get to operate it.
Can you give an example of a plant that has been built under this streamlined process and what kind of timeline it had?
The only recent nuclear buildouts that I personally have knowledge of are expansions to existing plants and thus have a lower barrier to get going.
Since it was just released, that’s pretty hard to do eh?
I’m familiar with the reactors built on other previous ‘expedited’ processes that ended up being anything but fast. We’ll see how it goes eh?
If it was just released, then your claims about it are entirely hypothetical and best-case-scenario. Of course we have to "see how it goes" - there's no merit but hopefulness to your stance...
A change in regulations is not a meritless argument, it's useful information
Lol, that every prior process has gone this way (including ‘express’ processes) surely has no value? Uh huh.
This is a sodium fast reactor, which is far more advanced than most nuclear reactors, at high temperatures (not that bad: "only 510 C, 950 F). Sodium is infamously hard to deal with, incredibly reactive to water, capable of embrittling metal, and any impurities in the incredibly hot loop can dissolve and transfer and create incredibly corrrosive systems.
Superphenix in France (1973-1998) and Monju in Japan (1994-1995, 2010-2016) have both had significant technical challenges. The Soviets built have some sodium reactors.
I used to be very for a PRISM style reactor like TerraPower is working for, especially with something like Integral Fast Reactor's on-site non-proliferation-safe pyroprocessing. But man, over the years, I just appreciate more and more how hard it is to build and maintain well. I'm both rooting for TerraPower, but also, it low key feels like an "if not when" situation, that this an incredibly energetic unsafe system to be dealing with, and it seems hard to imagine this being a safe long term cost effective solution. I hope the inspections are very very for real, very in depth, very detailed, given the scope of what is being built. It's not even a big reactor! But that much very high temperature sodium going around, right by a big nuclear reactor (smartly TerraPower has separate nuclear and energy "wings), is deeply concerning, and needs incredibly detailed inspections if this is to provide the lasting safe value it is purporting to deliver.