# Once you create a regulation you don't even have to argue anymore There’s an interesting phenomena around nuclear power - lots of people are running around proclaiming how great, safe, and important it is. It looks almost as if they are viciously fighting an invisible foe because you don’t see people running around yelling about the evils and danger of nuclear power. I don’t think this is just my filter bubble - there are genuinely no anti-nuclear advocates anymore.[^1] You see this phenomena repeated in many other situations - many advocates for a policy that just never seems to happen despite an apparently nonexistent opposition. So what’s going on here? The opposition doesn’t *need* to argue because their position has been crystalized into law via regulation. The regulations on books make it so difficult to build nuclear plants that it barely happens. Regulations set the default: whatever the regulations dictate will happen unless someone takes explicit action. On top of that default, it’s easier to create new laws than to repeal them both mechanically and from an optics perspective. So, in order for actions that go against existing regulation to happen, advocates need to convince politicians to take annoying and not particularly rewarding actions before opponents need to do *anything.* In effect, regulations create a massive fortifications that opponents need to scale before a battle can even happen. Regulations usually come in the form of lots of little laws with intertwined dependencies rather than one big law. There is no law that says “you need to spend a fuckton of money and time to build a nuclear plant.” There’s just a regulation on where you can put it here, a regulation on the type of study you need to do before you can build it there, a regulation on the type of contractor who can build it here, a regulation on the specs for the piping there … Violate *any* of these and the whole project is dead. So not only does the regulated activity suffer a death of a thousand cuts, but it increases the burden on any legislator trying to enable it further. They have to fight to change each individual regulation - removing any one of them won’t make much of a difference. Ultimately, the system ends up looking like an engine that dies because of a thousand little friction points than one big blockage. This type of failure is much harder to fix. [[When you see a position being advocated with no pushback but no action - it means there are a bunch of little frictions in the system]]. The upshot is that once a position is strongly solidified into regulation, it doesn’t require much active maintenance from its proponents. [^1]: Obviously there were in the past ### Related * [[Regulations create paradigm lock-in]] * [[‘Yeah but it’s dangerous’ isn’t a valid argument not to do things]]