Isaiah Taylor

Because innovation is new.

Innovation is about technology that doesn't exist yet.

And you can only regulate things that exist.

You're putting down guardrails around a thing that exists.

So some industries have figured out how to do this really well.

So I would say aviation is a good example.

Aviation has a robust test framework where if you have an idea for an airplane,

you can go take it out into the desert you can build your plane you can fly it you can even crash it right you try not to crash it but like there's a regulatory framework that allows you to test and what that means is that in aerospace you get to very very quickly move through these different prototypes and aviation is now this incredibly safe thing right it's safer than driving right flying on a commercial jet is safer than driving your car

And the only reason that's possible is because the regulators have created this space where innovators can just like test stuff.

So that's what's been missing in nuclear primarily.

You can talk about all sorts of other problems with the NRC.

We were talking about Alara, talking about linear no threshold, some of the bad policies that have taken the sort of existing industry and corrupted it and made it expensive.

But I would say even more fundamental than that is that you have to test.

If we're going to be dominant in nuclear, you have to allow innovators, entrepreneurs, technologists to create a small reactor, turn it on, and test it out.

If you can't do that, you don't have an industry, or at least you won't have an industry in a decade or two.

Who is the NRC?

So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a commission created by Congress in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.

It's sort of gone through a couple iterations and various acts of Congress since then, but it has five commissioners and it's responsible for regulating nuclear.

And I would say it's not done a good job of that.

And the evidence for the fact that it has not done a good job of that is since 1979,