Brett Kugelmass discusses internal cultural and administrative hurdles inside the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Assertion Contradicted
Kugelmass: Global SMR sector is entirely PR, with zero physical construction
“Well, there's virtually nothing actually being built globally anywhere for anything other than the traditional reactors. There's a lot of press announcements. Our company is building stuff, but we can get to that later. And then everything else is very theoret…”
Insight
Kugelmass: Poor construction methods and subsidies crippled global nuclear deployment
“The only reason that we don't have 10 times as much nuclear As we do today, both installed, but also being built, is simply because the way that we have decided to build them is terrible. Just overly complex construction, like, awful financial incentives, usua…”
Assertion Supported
Kugelmass: NuScale's NRC certificate is for a deprecated design they discarded
“The things that they got the certificate for are deprecated designs. So no, they don't have like, yeah, like everything that you're seeing is for something they submitted years and years and years ago, and they've totally thrown in the trash at this point also…”
What-if
Kugelmass: Replicating 1968 nuclear blueprints would cut global energy costs fivefold
“If you, if we just like went into those facilities, like looked at the blueprints and the Built them exactly how they were built. We would decarbonize the entire planet, and every human being would have energy that's, like, five times cheaper than they're payi…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2035
Kugelmass: Advanced chemistry nuclear reactors will not deploy until mid-2030s
“The ones that are most realistic, even by their own admission, by the way, to be built in the next five to 10 years, are the ones that use the traditional proven reactor technology and don't introduce some sort of physics chemistry or material science innovati…”
Assertion Supported
Kugelmass: No entity has completed NRC licensing for under $1 billion
“In order to get a license, you have to submit a license application. It is at minimum, in the U.S., it's at minimum four years, ah, worth of work. No one has done it for less than one billion dollars. No one has spent less than one billion dollars in licensing…”