The US has the most nuclear power plants in the world. Other countries have also had issues, this is not specific to NRC.
The issue of building nuclear power is not as simple as blaming regulators. They are high CapEx, often lack standardization (which extends buildouts by years and interest destroys the project), have supply chain issues, electricity demand peaked, loss of labour knowledge, etc. It’s easy to blame the regulators, but you end up finding the situation more complex when you look at the details.
For example, despite popular belief, the CCP can’t exactly force Chinese nuclear regulators. In their case, regulators are in fact playing a strong role and ensuring safety. Even if China is claiming 33 reactors under construction, most of them are just at a proposed stage.
The real thing that will make the difference for China is massive demand so that they can power data centers, which leads to supply chain efficiency, reduced overall cost and labour knowledge buildup. All of that is largely a question of demand (of clean and reliable energy) rather than lack of regulation. In practice, without the regulation, populations would have rebelled due to unsafe development. Regulation and public sentiment have certainly played a role, but of course that’s not the whole story.
There’s a good reason nuclear power plants now need to be able to withstand a plane crash.
It’s the same with AI, of course we need regulatory practices to make sure critical technology we barely understand doesn’t go off-the-rails. But I suspect we just have fundamentally different understanding of what AI becomes capable of and how that transforms the world in ways that would be highly unstable without safety.
