BW chief says regs ‘fetish’ a pain for nuclear

“Regulatory impedance” is among the challenges facing the new nuclear renaissance, the chief executive officer of BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., said Monday at a professional conference.

“For whatever reason, western nations, developed economies, develop maybe a little bit of a fetish around regulation, control oversight, audit,” Rex Geveden, the BWX Technologies (BWXT) chief, said in Orlando at the American Nuclear Society’s 2024 Winter Conference and Expo. “[A]nd unfortunately I think it carries in some cases more economic value than innovation, production and delivery.”

Aside from leading management and operations contractors at Department of Energy nuclear sites and being the sole source of naval reactors for U.S. naval warships and submarines, a virtual monopoly that makes up most of its revenue, BWXT is also shoring up its commercial nuclear power business.

The company’s commercial ventures include a planned fuel fabrication facility and the BWXT Advanced Nuclear Reactor, or BANR: a 50 megawat module high-temperature gas reactor.

In his presentation, Monday Geveden said he was less worried about one of the industry’s usual hand-wringers, recruiting, and that even with some of the challenges of shifting the nuclear supply chain back to the U.S., an initiative started under administration of President Joe Biden (D), there were “puts and takes.”

But regulatory overreach, Geveden said, was a real threat.

“And we’ve got to get that right, the balance has to be right,” Geveden said. “Companies, individuals, have to be rewarded for risking capital and that can’t be out of balance and it can’t be too heavy or it’ll impede progress and so we’ve got to crack that equation too. I don’t know how to solve it, but it is something we need to address.”

Geveden spoke a week after President-elect Donald Trump (R) appointed supporters Elon Musk, the loquacious industrial billionaire, and Vivek Ramiswammy, a vanquished foe for the Republican presidential nomination, as the leaders of a group intended to advise the incoming administration about drastically cutting government expenses.