PM:
"As for nuclear regulation, I think what we have seen proves that long-term effective regulation of the nuclear power industry is not feasible. Nuclear power by its nature is too concentrated in terms of size, sunk capital, expertise, etc., and hence a very corrupting influence on the political system and hence the regulators."

Alex Luta: Well, not necessarily. I would like to bring Finland into the discussion. I would not like to say that the parliamentary approval of the new-build projects for the Olkiluoto 4 and the new plant at Hanhikivi have been models of good governance, but what _has_ been is the ongoing friction between the technology provider Areva and the nuclear regulator STUK in the case of the Olkiluoto 3 reactor. I think there have been calculations showing how that one reactor has become the most expensive building project in the history of mankind, simply due to the intransigence of STUK in the implementation of safety regulations. We're talking of "Nope, that's no good, tear it down and build it again"
type of interventions. Hardly the stuff that corruption scandals are made of. There you have a concrete empirical example that organizations _can_ be designed in ways that make regulatory capture difficult.

PM: Alex Luta raises an interesting comparative
example: nuclear regulation appears to be far stricter in Finland. My comments were intended to be mostly aimed at Japan, and perhaps the US, but political systems in the Nordic region, not least of all Finland, do suggest that effective nuclear regulation is possible. A crucial reason is that interest groups have a much more difficult time using money to influence politics and policy in Nordic countries than in Japan, the US, or alas, in more average democratic states. It would be very hard for an interest group to buy TV and radio time to criticize nuclear regulators or their backers, or to buy off politicians and bureaucrats. However, one other problem is that nuclear regulation, as I mentioned before, is an on-going process, not a one-time fix. Finland may have effective regulation today, but what about in 10, 20,
50 or more years later? The political system there looks very uncorruptible today, but will it continue to be so in the future? I would add that this applies even more so to nuclear regulation in the US. From the outside, the NRC looks uncorrupted today (although NISA appeared, except perhaps to the closest observers, relatively competent and uncorrupted two years ago, and after a future accident we might learn new things about the NRC that would not leave a good impression), but given how financial regulation became corrupted in the US, there are even more reasons to doubt the future, if not current, integrity of nuclear regulation in the US.

Paul Midford
Norwegian University for Science and Technology