The current state of nuclear power safety regulation is obsessive, repressive, and too costly. There’s a fear (and supporting evidence) that the massive weight of our regulatory structure will both economically burden and delay building more conventional reactors and stymie the development of fresh alternative designs.

We come to our current state of affairs through three main processes. First, we (the industry’s engineers) made improvements on our own to ensure the reliability and longevity of our plants. Sometimes, well-meaning external critics push for improvements that are recognized by the industry as worthwhile. The designers of competitive products and their owners will then push for a common standard from the government.

Then there is the human factor that’s more political science than nuclear engineering. Regulators are people, too, and their job is to issue regulations and hold the owners and operators to those regulations. As a human employee, in a perfect nuclear world, that makes for a pretty boring career. In other words, regulators want to regulate—and they do, even as they search for justifications for new regulations.

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Lastly, there’s the “standing on hind legs” political regulation. When news breaks of an event at a nuclear plant somewhere in the world, certain political types will jump up and demand changes, sometimes detailed, that are hard to quickly analyze or refute in the fevered fora of public media.

The first type is “organic” for a maturing technology. We first built a variety of small plants—some did great, and some were........

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