The worst environmental crisis in human history is going largely unchecked. I find it hard to take seriously any argument that environmental regulation has gone too far as opposed to not nearly far enough.
If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good I'm cool with revisiting anything, but the common sense wisdom around environmental regulation has been corrupted by corporate public relations campaigns.
Here's one example: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-...
I mostly agree with you, but it is worth paying attention to the details.
So, instead, California continues to mostly build single family housing sprawl into natural habitats.
A clear example of environmental regulation hurting the environment and the climate. And of course the affordability of housing.
That's an opinion I encounter constantly and it's a meme that was manufactured in PR company meeting rooms, right wing think tanks, and neo-classical economists theoretical models of how the world works.
> But Casa Joaquin’s neighboring, overwhelmingly white homeowners could have used CEQA to demand costly studies and multiple hearings before Berkeley officials.
Important to note that white people are well-represented at UC Berkley too. https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts
> More recently, a series of court rulings that culminated last year nearly forced Berkeley to withhold admission of thousands of high school seniors...
Graduating high-school seniors are also known as incoming freshman or legal adults.
> ... because the state’s judges agreed with NIMBY neighborhood groups that population growth is an inherent environmental impact under CEQA.
Ok, let's see how big the UC school system is...
> The University maintains approximately 6,000 buildings enclosing 137 million gross square feet on approximately 30,000 acres across its ten campuses, five medical centers, nine agricultural research and extension centers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2017/chapt...
I'm not seeing evidence that protestors were primarily NIMBYs and pesky white homeowners. I can find several articles citing _student_ protests.
> “It’s students who set up People’s Park in the first place, so it’s our place to defend it,” said Athena Davis, a first-year student at UC Berkeley who spoke at the rally. “It’s up to students to reject the idea that our housing needs to come at the price of destroying green space and homes for the marginalized.”
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/01/30/protesters-tear-down...
Literally, in the UK you can’t build if there’s a protected bat species in the area.
Now the cost of solar and storage are dropping at a rate I doubt nuclear is ever going to make a significant comeback. I'm not opposed to it, but I wonder if the economics will ever be favorable even with regulatory reform.
I just don't like the general attitude that because you can find something to disagree with that environmental regulation as a general rule is bad. It isn't.
There are thousands and thousands of pages of environmental regulations. Obviously people are going to be able to find some things that need to be revisited, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Nothing should be repealed without evidence and in many cases amendments are more prudent than repeals.
Commercially. Several early test reactors were essentially just graphite moderated piles not unlike Chernobyl, but they were abandoned for a reason.
>Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
Using land efficiently in walkable places is one of the most environmentally friendly things we can be doing, and supposed "environmentalists" sought to block it using "environmental" rules!
If that's not NIMBYism to you, you have blinders on.
That is the case for base load generation, where the plant can operate near 100% capacity all the time. But that isn't were gas is usually being deployed; it being used for reserve generation. The economics of nuclear isn't as favourable in that application as it costs more or less the same to run at partial generation, or even no generation, as it does when it is going full blast.
I've never said all environmental regulation is good. That would be stupid, but you should have evidence based reasons for wanting to repeal or modify a regulation.
Existing regulation was put in place for a reason and those reasons likely still matter. Even if the regulation is falling short of having unintended consequences.
I'm sure there are better examples to illustrate your point
> homes for people to live in
Student housing. Which likely means partially-furnished studios with shared bathrooms and a kitchenette at best. This isn't the useful housing folks are asking for.
To me, it seems UC wants to bulldoze a park famous for homeless camps and replace it with student housing. Pro-development is trying to cast the UC expansion in the same light as folks asking for affordable housing. But, UC is not providing useful housing for residents of Berkley.
*I am not going into immense detail here. It is admittedly a bit more complex than this, but this is a reasonable summary
[0] https://youtu.be/TKN7Cl6finE?si=CR4SjVK5_ojk-OKq [1] https://www.planningreport.com/2015/12/21/new-ceqa-study-rev...
https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...
That kind of "wait, no, not THAT kind of housing, not HERE" is textbook NIMBYism.
There may have been some student protestors, but the money behind the legal challenges were all wealthy local NIMBYs.
Getting rid of LNT would allow higher doses to workers, and the way it makes nuclear cheaper is by having less shielding around the reactor.
But if you look at how recent reactors like the AP1000 failed, it's not so much because of the mere quantity of concrete. In fact, one of the big advantages of the AP1000 is that it used a fraction of the concrete and steel of prior designs. The real problem at Vogtle were construction logistics, matching up design to constructible plans, and doing that all in an efficient manner.
The construction process didn't run over budget and over timeline because of environmental regulations, that happened because we don't know how to build big things anymore, in combination with leadership asking for regulatory favors like starting construction before everything has been fully designed, which gave them more rope to hang themselves with.
I don't know the specifics of why France forgot how to build, at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, but I imagine it's a similar tale as in the US. High labor costs, poor logistics, projects dragged out, and having to pay interest on the loan for years and years extra with every delay.
If there's somebody with more specifics on how unnecessary regulation is killing nuclear, I'd love to see it. But after watching attentively and with great interest since ~2005, I've become so disillusioned with nuclear that I doubt we'll ever see it have success in the West again. Factories and manufacturing have seen productivity go through the roof over the past 50 years, while construction productivity is stagnant. Playing to our strengths, and using our very limited construction capacity on building factories rather than building generators, seems far wiser on the macroeconomic scale.
The alternative is not to have no environmental regulation. California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.
In Massachusetts you can't clear shoreline. Specifically, if you buy waterfront property on a pond / lake, you can't clear the shoreline to make a beach in your backyard. You can only use what used to be there before the law was passed. There's even restrictions on building close to shorelines, so if you want to build, you need to find an existing building and renovate.
Now, I'm not a wetland expert, so maybe someone will chime in and tell me why every inch of freshwater shoreline must be undisturbed. But I like freshwater swimming and suspect that we can allocate some space for human recreation.
One of the biggest problems today is that urban planning has basically evaporated. Local and state governments don't plan towns anymore. Things are left to developers who have no other concern than to run a street off a major road and plop a few houses down, sell, and move on to the next project. No thought is given to traffic or public services or walkability or public transportation. No care is given to integration with existing urban structures. Instead of mixed-use zoning or building houses around a common public space, which are historically the more common and sensible form of urban planning, we end up with car-dependent suburban dead zones, suburban sprawl.
This should be receiving more attention from environmentalists, as urban planning is intimately related to environmental issues.
Says whom?
California has a huge population. California has a massive water shortage problem. California has wide areas vulnerable to wildfires. California has piles of small ecosystems that are fragile and can be easily wiped out.
Saying California could copy some states like Iowas regulations makes negative sense.
Ok, strong example here: the long term efforts to stop forest fires caused build up of fuel that should have burned up in small fires which then instead burned up ecosystems which evolved for small forest fires and instead were destroyed in large ones.
That's a well intentioned environmental policy that had terrible effects.
Fuel efficiency programs with the goal of reducing emissions with exceptions for work vehicles killed small trucks and meant a ton of people who do approximately 0 work drive around enormous vehicles that were designed big to match the exception criteria.
That's another one.
Ethanol to replace gasoline is also an enormous negative consequence waste that started as an environmental program.
Things don't just work because you want them to and programs aren't automatically right because of what they intend to do.
Far too many people argue for things they don't understand at all because of the surface intention of them and treat discussion about them blasphemy. (I chose uncontroversial negative examples because I don't want to get sidetracked into arguments about my examples with zealots)
- the extreme cost and time spent on mandatory Environmental Impact Reports
- it allows pretty much anyone to sue projects over just about anything, which can also add many years before projects can start
None of this has anything to do with California specific environmental concerns
we should either delete the regulations, or add exemptions for the infrastructure we need to build to avoid climate disaster
this is a time sensitive issue for our environment. every day spent debating regulatory nuance is a day wasted
at this point I prefer drastic decisive action over continued inaction: delete the regulations and re-introduce them
https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-millio...
I spent 10 minutes and have not been able to find said "government-commissioned review". Is this even true?
Which fits with OP’s assertion that it does “more harm than good.” (Fortunately, restricting the private right of action would curtail a lot of the harm. On the national level I’m pretty much at the point of wanting NEPA repealed.)
The stilted phrasing in the report from Salmon Business definitely does not sound very credible, but marine life protection is definitely a real thing with nuclear and all fuel-burning electricity generation
The vast quantities of water needed to cool nuclear (for every kWh of electricity, 2 kWh of waste heat must be discarded) can have significant impacts on wildlife. In the past, we just devastated ecosystems but most modern countries decided they didn't want to do that anymore.
This is not a nuclear regulation, it's a "thermal plant" regulation, it's just that nuclear needs more cooling than, say, combined-cycle gas because nuclear's lower temperatures are less efficient at converting heat to electricity.
At a mere $700M, even dropping all marine life mitigations from Hinkley Point C wouldn't help much with affordability. If they could drop $7B of costs from Hinkley then it may start to have a halfway-competitive price, but it still wouldn't be very attractive.
Are you prevented from fresh water swimming because you can't fabricate a beach for yourself, even if you own the property next to it? Seems like a strange complaint
Besides, half the fun of the "beach" is the clearing where you can sit and read a book or play in the sand.
I can imagine a future in which every data center has a little baby nuclear plant built right next to it. Watts per acre may become a significant measurement of density. Solar’s environmental impact is of course dramatically overstated by its opponents, but it won’t be when we scale it up and have to start slashing forests for it.
Fair point that renewables may have a practical expansion limit, but for the time being are, by far, the cheapest option so a data centre is still going to prefer that source of power to the greatest extent possible, thereby leaving gas/nuclear only as reserve — of which nuclear has not proven to be cost effective at. Geothermal, hydro, etc. are hard to beat, but where you aren't sitting on the perfect environment, generally speaking, wind+solar+gas is about as good as it gets on a cost basis.
And in many cases, single family homes are perfectly fine. You don't build skyscrapers in the Catskills. So they're not the issue. The issue is how they're arranged. Look at how old towns, even in the US, were or are constituted (at least those that have remained unscathed by Robert Moses-style mutilation). Plenty of single family homes arranged around a discernible town center. Walkable. The density consists of building around a town center instead of building willy-nilly along a road, because some strip of farmland has come up for sale. (This has the incidental defect of building on fertile land, now lost permanently to residential space.)
1) They become political. Rules are made (or not made) to appeal to voting blocks rather than by evaluating the science.
2) There is a strong tendency not to destroy that which exists. By any reasonable standard coal filed powerplants should not exist.
3) (Could be considered part of #2) There is a strong tendency to look at risks in isolation rather than in the marketplace. We should not be aiming to make industries as safe as practical, we should be aiming to make the outcome as safe as possible. These are very different things! The extreme example of this is electricity. Coal is ~10x as dangerous as oil which is ~10x as dangerous as natural gas which is ~10x as dangerous as nuclear. The risk to society is measured in deaths (or other harm) per terawatt-hour, not by whether any given generator is as safe as it reasonably can be.
Likewise, an even bigger "disaster" at Fukushima--that killed nobody. (The deaths from the evacuation are not deaths from the incident--they wouldn't have died if they had stayed put.)
And the cost overruns are to a large degree due to regulations--specifically, changing regulations. The environmentalists have destroyed nuclear by forcing delays and changes, that is the *majority* of the cost. Especially the delays.