I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.
This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.
Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.
A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
alt Hacker News
I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.
This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.
Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.
A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.