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I think a pervasive theme in US infrastructure (and why it's expensive) is that we've gotten out of practice of building. I think it's the deeper "why" to this

I think a pervasive theme in US infrastructure (and why it's expensive) is that we've gotten out of practice of building. I think it's the deeper "why" to this issue. We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. Every job now seems custom. Only Parsons or whoever has the ability to do it, and even they have to scrounge around for the project manager. Other countries are in their building phase and have thousands of engineers who are practiced in standardizing designs and squeezing out inefficiencies. They have graduating classes full of highway engineers. For gods sake, they even have graduating classes full of engineers specializing in the tooling for highway / railroad engineering machinery. Our building phase was post-war construction-crazy economic expansion era. Now we're in the maintenance phase, where big new projects are the exception. Not to denigrate the great importance of doing great maintenance, but in practice you can't keep (or attract) a large pool of well paid expert engineers going on that level of activity. They go where the projects go. And as a result, as the report points out, when everything is "for the first time again" and custom because you do it once per decade, the particular factors of a given site are allowed to dictate what the system design should be. (Maybe also not insignificant: the environmental considerations allowed to creep in, just to point that out, as grateful as I am for the protection that we give these matters). Rather than (for better or worse, probably a bit worse) in other countries, they're stamping out highways, railroad, power plants by the week, and the environment is made to fit the construction. It's choices we made, over time, that caused us to atrophy our capabilities here. It could be brought back with investment.

mymythisisthis 6y ago
The gov should just pay people $15 an hour to study welding. It's the best way of; i)getting people trained, ii)having a kind-of minimum wage accessible to many people.
- sunshinerag 6y ago
  Why would the gov. need to pay people? if there is a demand for welding people in the market, their pays would signal people to study for it isn't it?
  - yvdriess 6y ago
    They get payed for the work, not the training (with some exceptions). Not being payed for training is a barrier for people who are not in a good financial situation.
    - sunshinerag 6y ago
      If there are lot of potential people with willingness to train and a market to pay for trained people a market for training them with deferred loans etc. would be there?
    - spenczar5 6y ago
      I wonder why banks don’t offer loans for job training programs. Seems like it might work. Or maybe they do?
      - fred_is_fred 6y ago
        You can get student loans to go to welding school - yes.
  - milesskorpen 6y ago
    People change plans now to need fewer welders (like deciding not to build things) - because there are too few welders - which results in fewer welders in the future. Becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Government action can help break that cycle.
- vizzier 6y ago
  This sort of thing has been theorized under the name of the Job Guarantee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  Tons of welding jobs already exist and already pay a minimum of approximately $15/hr. Unless you meant welding engineers when you said 'study', like some of my compatriots building automated robotic weld cells, who get paid 4x that much. And there's plenty of training courses at the local caterer center and community college for both those jobs at reasonable rates. Local manufacturers often pay hourly+tuition for their best fabricators or line workers who want a promotion to the welder position to go through one of those programs.
- dugditches 6y ago
  Welding seems to be this fruit that people reach for when they think of Trades. There's lots of welding schools churning out 'graduates' throughout the year. Welders are almost always the first guys laid off in shops. The 'learn to code' thing thrown around would be better.
  - no_wizard 6y ago
    I wish it would not be the narrative. I think in university and where else appropriate, it should be taught, like a friend of mine who works in finance said, everyone will need this as a skill eventually for complex work The whole narrative of producing more 'software developers' in general though? No thank you. I see enough people coming off of less than stellar bootcamps (there are, in fact, good ones, though I'm finding this less true over time) who just see dollar signs who have no interest in this as a craft. I don't want to encourage that, at all. In fact, I want certification for the title of Software Engineer, no different than having to be certified like civil engineers do. Uncle Bob is right about this one.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  What's special about welding? You also need carpenters, plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, etc for any major infrastructure undertaking, having 50,000 unemployed welders doesn't really make any sense.
jorblumesea 6y ago
The issue is mostly political and not financial or knowledge problems. How you accomplish that is government spending, and there's a certain subsection of the population that has been convinced that government spending is universally bad. There are vested interests waging a war against the US building infrastructure because its ideologically against the narrative developed. "Starve the beast" has turned any kind of fiscal spending into a huge political battle. It used to be, funding basic things was just a given. Now it's a fight over every little dollar.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  The factions against this kind of government spending also happen to be the same ones who blow up the debt and deficit on tax cuts for the rich when they're in power, then bang on the table about how it's the most important issue when they're out of power. In approximately 61 days, conservatives in the US will be in an absolute panic about the financial state of the country.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    The boomercons in my circle have given up on fiscal responsibility and have now just accepted the fact that we're going to default at some point, so there's no point in fretting about it. It'll be interesting to see if the Congress critters follow suit.
    - nwah1 6y ago
      The US debt is denominated in a currency that it is the sovereign issuer of. The US has full ability to pay such debts, at the cost of inflation. Large deficits would be fine if the spending were for investments with a high ROI, such as infrastructure or nuclear power. Indeed, going further into debt for an investment with great ROI makes sense. Regardless of the debt level, a good investment is a good investment. And a bad investment is a bad investment. Alas, most spending of the US federal government isn't an investment of any type.
      - 6y ago
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Maybe the answer is (a) Green New Deal. Basically just rebuild the whole infrastructure - no tinkering around the edges, just replace the lot. Start with engineering courses, bringing on new talent. Spin up hundreds of solar farms, battery factories etc My question is are there real innovations to be made - do we need to rely on concrete and steel ? Are new homes possible in flat packs? I would rather packet it into small parcels (10-100M) that explore the phase space of possible than think a quick government report can define infrastructure for a century On top of which we should heed the strong town lesson - only build what we need, and cost in the car externalities in our cities. Just thinking out loud ...
- animal_spirits 6y ago
  In 50 years do we come to the same point in the road with different infrastructure?
  - landryraccoon 6y ago
    That would still be a better outcome than if in 50 years we came to the same point in the road with World War 2 infrastructure.
- blueblisters 6y ago
  One of the problems with New Deal-like projects is what do you do with new engineering and construction talent once the projects are complete? China is pushing OBOR onto developing countries to make use of its excess construction capacity, with limited success. I don't think that's feasible with high-cost US labor.
  - piva00 6y ago
    Export it, if you have such a deal you will become a leading research and development center for it, it can become a feedback loop. You will still need engineers for improving the technology, you will be on the bleeding edge. You will still need maintenance crews, the constructors are the ones that know the most about what they built, why not train them to maintain it as well?
_n_b_ 6y ago
I don’t disagree with you generally. Luckily for the nuclear industry, the engineering capability still exists in the US to design a whole plant, and a lot of the manufacturing base still exists. Big US nuclear players have had a base load of domestic upgrades and international new plant jobs that have kept these capabilities alive. But for construction, we really are awfully thin on specialized trades. Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply.
- gricardo99 6y ago
  Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply. I've heard this time and again over the years, but it doesn't make sense to me. If welders made > 300k/year, surely they wouldn't be in short supply anymore. Why isn't there simply a wage/price signal to compensate for this? It's not like medicine that requires 6-8 years of school, and years more of practice to fill certain positions (where additional constraints are the schools and hospital residencies limited capacity). For welders, labor supply should be fairly easy and quick to remedy.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    I think there's an underestimated resistance to changing the labor rate. If a company quotes a typical job at 80 man-hours with $15/hr welders, and a year later you want to hire welders and can only find them at $20, they're more likely to complain there's a welder shortage and decline jobs because they don't have enough welders to complete them than increase their labor rate. Plus, if you increase the rate for a new guy, and your $12/hr hire from a decade ago hears the new hire is making $20, he's going to be pissed, so you'd have to increase costs across the board or suppress discussion of salaries.
    - triceratops 6y ago
      This explanation doesn't really hold water. Some company is going to eventually win the contract by bidding with $20/hr welders right? It's not like the client is just going to give up on their project.
Lammy 6y ago
This is exactly the reason I think Richard Nixon’s 1973 plan for “1000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000” would have been so impactful for us. It’s hard to get good at only building a handful of something. e: I misremembered; it was actually 1000 by 1980
- erentz 6y ago
  A thousand! We’d be so rich in carbon free energy we’d be exporting it to Canada and Mexico and still have hundreds of GW left over to, I dunno, produce hydrogen 24/7 for other uses. We could decarbonize our grid today with only something in the vicinity of ~200 new plants. This is entirely doable. France showed how it’s done in the 80s. It’s sad we can’t start now.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    Unfortunately that was a very different regulatory era for nuclear development than we have today, so who knows if it would be feasible. Watergate happened not long after that declaration, and one of Gerald Ford’s first major acts as replacement President was signing the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, to split the Atomic Energy Commission (responsible for both civilian and military nuclear development) into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (responsible for regulating civilian nuclear power) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (responsible for supporting military nuclear development).
    - normaljoe 6y ago
      To be fair those are completely different things. Commercial needs a profit and uses low enriched material. Military is not concerned with profit and uses highly enriched material. I am not as familiar with the commercial side but I can say the military model is safe as all get out and produces less waste since you only need to refuel ever few decades or so. Also NRC is very much still involved with Military applications, which at this point just involves moving expensive war ships around.
      - 6y ago
mistrial9 6y ago
I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the parent post here, and add, that in the construction industry in California over the last thirty+ years, the pressure on middle-tier contractors combined with human nature, made a blatant game of taking away the pay from anyone who could not defend themselves in a transaction. That sometimes is the workers, sometimes the suppliers of materials, sometimes the contract holder.. Theft escalated and wages stayed stagnant or actually fell. "Illegal" labor is ordinary and expected. I would welcome some case studies from the commentors here, because "reasons" given in comments are not explaining what I have seen with my own eyes.
- csa 6y ago
  > "Illegal" labor is ordinary and expected. I agree with your entire comment, but I want to emphasize the part about illegal labor. There are entire industries built on the back of illegal labor, and I think many otherwise informed Americans are not aware of this. We have some fairly substantial mismatches between our labor market and our immigration policies. Before someone says “just don’t use illegal labor”, please realize that this means that you will be out of business due to a lack of competitiveness since literally everyone else in your line of business does it. Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, maybe it’s just better off staying like it is — the market is clearing. On the other hand, I kind of wish proper enforcement of the laws would happen. This would force these companies to pay wages that legal workers would take. This, of course, would require them to raise their prices to the end user, but it would give legal laborers more... of something... definitely money, definitely rights, and maybe a bigger piece of the pie. I don’t work in any of these fields, but I know people who do. I would love to hear from HNers who have first hand experience.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    > many otherwise informed Americans It also has to do with conversation venue. Think how many HN commenters work for companies like Uber/Lyft, just for one example.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    There are entire industries built on the back of illegal labor, and I think many otherwise informed Americans are not aware of this. Indeed. The game though, is a big reason for hiring people illegally is to keep costs down. Because illegal workers area afraid to complain and will work for less. Now, when the average moron finds that there are lots of illegals in industry X, or in the country as a whole, they get up in arms about the illegals, support a crackdown but the crackdown doesn't remove the illegals but makes them more afraid, reinforcing the whole system. So the typical ideology of this country makes accomplices of people to the racket when sun light is (selectively) shed on the situation. It's funny that China runs their on the same legal/illegal division of labor but in China the "illegals" are internal to China, people from the countryside who don't have official permission to be in the city.
masklinn 6y ago
> I think a pervasive theme in US infrastructure (and why it's expensive) is that we've gotten out of practice of building. I think it's the deeper "why" to this issue. When it comes to nuclear, that's a problem the world over. Out of practice of designing as well. Look no further than the mess that is the EPR. On its face it seems like a boondoggle, but it makes a lot more sense when you look back at the history of nuclear construction: from 1971 to 1993, France was continuously building plants, first the 34 900MW CP-series (1971 to 1988) then the 20 1300MW P-series (1978 to 1993). The CP-series took 5-6 years to build and the P-series a bit more (6-7). From the mid-70s to the mid 80s, there were a dozen plans being built at any time, and they were being completed. Then came the N4, that thing had serious teething issues, the first model started construction in 1985 but took 12 years to complete. By the time the 4th was completed, it was down to 7 years. But the 4th was the last N4 to be built. It's unclear to me whether the N4 slowdown was intended all along or whether the teething issues made them take a look at construction and pump the brakes, but in the space of 5 years the country went from building 12 plants at a time to building 5, then 4, then 3, then 2, then 1. N4 at least overlapped some with the tail end of the CP-series and the middle of the P-series, but the first EPR construction was started in 2007, 5 years after the last N4 (Civaux 2) was completed. I can't even imagine the loss in institutional knowledge over that span.
- m463 6y ago
  > When it comes to nuclear, that's a problem the world over. I think there's a perception problem. Do people readily go to school to study nuclear engineering? I don't think it carries a stigma per se, but it would not be that sexy, and it would be harder to get a job and keep it subject to political whim on a 4-year-cycle. (A more practical/guaranteed job would probably be a petroleum engineer, especially wrt fracking)
  - 7952 6y ago
    A lot of people are going to be discouraged simply because it sounds and is a difficult subject to study. And not everyone with enthusiasm is going to have the grades.
  - 6y ago
wpietri 6y ago
I think another important factor is that to the extent we have people with lots of daily experience, they're not in charge. We've shifted from work-focused to plan-focused behavior. To the extent that we don't even know there's another option. A talk that really opened my eyes was Mary Poppendieck's "Tyranny of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan/ https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of... It turns out the Empire State Building was created on time and under budget, and against a very hard deadline. They did not have a complete plan when they started; they were designing the top floors as they were building the bottom ones. In software, we've become familiar with how over-planning creates a lot of waste. But I was still surprised how broadly that lesson applies.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  Commercial skyscrapers get built on time and on budget all the time (in not-California-land, at least). They sign big leases with big tenants before they can get financing, and the building needs to be open when the lease says it will. Strangely enough, pretty much the last thing they do is to design the foundation. Once they know the building is a go, they drill and take core samples at dozens of places around the site and use that information to design a foundation that will hold the building as designed. This is the when things start to cost large amounts of real money, so they don’t do it until they have to. The concrete mat that ties all the caissons together is a single pour that can involve hundreds of concrete trucks and take a day or more to do, all of it orchestrated to ensure every truck arrives exactly on schedule. All this is to say that there is still an awful lot of skill in the construction industry.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    I certainly agree there's a lot of skill; my point is more that it's often not running the show. As to on-time/on-budget rates, I'd love to see some data. Significant cost overruns and delays certainly still happen. E.g. this non-CA building was at least 20% over and a year late: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/business/comcast/comcast-tower-cost-overruns-philadelphia-four-seasons-20180418.html https://www.inquirer.com/philly/business/comcast/comcast-tow... And I'll note that the Empire State Building was not a standard office building of the day, but the tallest building in the world. (A title it held for 40 years.) People building today have an 80-year advantage, plus the rise of computers. You'd think we'd be able to do at least as well with every building, but we don't. That's in stark contrast to building safety, for example, where we're very good about learning lessons about keeping buildings from collapsing.
jariel 6y ago
"We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. " No, we definitely have those people. Thinks are more complicated across the board, safety practices are higher, contrary to public opinion wages are higher in this sector and I think there's a soft kind of pervasive corruption going on at the government and contractor layer, where there's just padding, waste, overbidding, back-scratching etc.. Montreal had some serious problems with corruption and was able to make progress on it, states and municipalities need to do the same. I would vote for the first person that wanted to make these things more efficient and transparent.
- fatbird 6y ago
  "[M]ore efficient and transparent" are at odds with each other. Transparency requires more process and scrutiny and inspection; more of these things increases project risk because bidders need to invest more money in getting the bid, and that increased risk is amortized across successful projects. It also has the effect of favouring entrenched interests and existing players because 1) they know the process, and 2) have the capital to endure longer lead time in sales.
deeeeplearning 6y ago
>They go where the projects go. So where do they go now? Are American trained Mech/Civil/Industrial/etc Engineers really going overseas in large numbers? We all know the cost of schooling is now exorbitant in the US and engineering salaries (certainly for software but I'd guess other disciplines as well) are generally higher here than anywhere else in the world. Where could they even go to make enough to pay off their student loans?
joe_the_user 6y ago
I feel critical of approaches that make generalization using "we" when talking about a serious of actions by some very specific institutions. The US has a complex state and a number of private corporations with a relationship to the state and each other. Who are you talking about in particular? Edit: I should add. It's not just the problem of having trouble building things but companies that get a lot of money out of failure and those companies symbiotic attachment to the government - consider the X billion dollar California rail planing process. Whoever did that didn't even have to create more than minimally to still leave with truckloads of cash. And they'll be on call for next time. Even that is just an example.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
I have an extremely half-baked idea of allowing mutual colonies-- landswaps between countries with special local laws and mobility. This would result in specialized supply chains and labor groupings that would enable, say, groups of Dutch or German brick/stone road builders to operate in America and show us how it's done.

mymythisisthis 6y ago

The gov should just pay people $15 an hour to study welding. It's the best way of; i)getting people trained, ii)having a kind-of minimum wage accessible to many people.

sunshinerag 6y ago
Why would the gov. need to pay people? if there is a demand for welding people in the market, their pays would signal people to study for it isn't it?
- yvdriess 6y ago
  They get payed for the work, not the training (with some exceptions). Not being payed for training is a barrier for people who are not in a good financial situation.
  - sunshinerag 6y ago
    If there are lot of potential people with willingness to train and a market to pay for trained people a market for training them with deferred loans etc. would be there?
  - spenczar5 6y ago
    I wonder why banks don’t offer loans for job training programs. Seems like it might work. Or maybe they do?
    - fred_is_fred 6y ago
      You can get student loans to go to welding school - yes.
- milesskorpen 6y ago
  People change plans now to need fewer welders (like deciding not to build things) - because there are too few welders - which results in fewer welders in the future. Becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Government action can help break that cycle.
vizzier 6y ago
This sort of thing has been theorized under the name of the Job Guarantee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Tons of welding jobs already exist and already pay a minimum of approximately $15/hr. Unless you meant welding engineers when you said 'study', like some of my compatriots building automated robotic weld cells, who get paid 4x that much. And there's plenty of training courses at the local caterer center and community college for both those jobs at reasonable rates. Local manufacturers often pay hourly+tuition for their best fabricators or line workers who want a promotion to the welder position to go through one of those programs.
dugditches 6y ago
Welding seems to be this fruit that people reach for when they think of Trades. There's lots of welding schools churning out 'graduates' throughout the year. Welders are almost always the first guys laid off in shops. The 'learn to code' thing thrown around would be better.
- no_wizard 6y ago
  I wish it would not be the narrative. I think in university and where else appropriate, it should be taught, like a friend of mine who works in finance said, everyone will need this as a skill eventually for complex work The whole narrative of producing more 'software developers' in general though? No thank you. I see enough people coming off of less than stellar bootcamps (there are, in fact, good ones, though I'm finding this less true over time) who just see dollar signs who have no interest in this as a craft. I don't want to encourage that, at all. In fact, I want certification for the title of Software Engineer, no different than having to be certified like civil engineers do. Uncle Bob is right about this one.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
What's special about welding? You also need carpenters, plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, etc for any major infrastructure undertaking, having 50,000 unemployed welders doesn't really make any sense.

jorblumesea 6y ago

The issue is mostly political and not financial or knowledge problems. How you accomplish that is government spending, and there's a certain subsection of the population that has been convinced that government spending is universally bad. There are vested interests waging a war against the US building infrastructure because its ideologically against the narrative developed. "Starve the beast" has turned any kind of fiscal spending into a huge political battle. It used to be, funding basic things was just a given. Now it's a fight over every little dollar.

ciarannolan 6y ago
The factions against this kind of government spending also happen to be the same ones who blow up the debt and deficit on tax cuts for the rich when they're in power, then bang on the table about how it's the most important issue when they're out of power. In approximately 61 days, conservatives in the US will be in an absolute panic about the financial state of the country.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  The boomercons in my circle have given up on fiscal responsibility and have now just accepted the fact that we're going to default at some point, so there's no point in fretting about it. It'll be interesting to see if the Congress critters follow suit.
  - nwah1 6y ago
    The US debt is denominated in a currency that it is the sovereign issuer of. The US has full ability to pay such debts, at the cost of inflation. Large deficits would be fine if the spending were for investments with a high ROI, such as infrastructure or nuclear power. Indeed, going further into debt for an investment with great ROI makes sense. Regardless of the debt level, a good investment is a good investment. And a bad investment is a bad investment. Alas, most spending of the US federal government isn't an investment of any type.
    - 6y ago

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

Maybe the answer is (a) Green New Deal. Basically just rebuild the whole infrastructure - no tinkering around the edges, just replace the lot. Start with engineering courses, bringing on new talent. Spin up hundreds of solar farms, battery factories etc My question is are there real innovations to be made - do we need to rely on concrete and steel ? Are new homes possible in flat packs? I would rather packet it into small parcels (10-100M) that explore the phase space of possible than think a quick government report can define infrastructure for a century On top of which we should heed the strong town lesson - only build what we need, and cost in the car externalities in our cities. Just thinking out loud ...

animal_spirits 6y ago
In 50 years do we come to the same point in the road with different infrastructure?
- landryraccoon 6y ago
  That would still be a better outcome than if in 50 years we came to the same point in the road with World War 2 infrastructure.
blueblisters 6y ago
One of the problems with New Deal-like projects is what do you do with new engineering and construction talent once the projects are complete? China is pushing OBOR onto developing countries to make use of its excess construction capacity, with limited success. I don't think that's feasible with high-cost US labor.
- piva00 6y ago
  Export it, if you have such a deal you will become a leading research and development center for it, it can become a feedback loop. You will still need engineers for improving the technology, you will be on the bleeding edge. You will still need maintenance crews, the constructors are the ones that know the most about what they built, why not train them to maintain it as well?

_n_b_ 6y ago

I don’t disagree with you generally. Luckily for the nuclear industry, the engineering capability still exists in the US to design a whole plant, and a lot of the manufacturing base still exists. Big US nuclear players have had a base load of domestic upgrades and international new plant jobs that have kept these capabilities alive. But for construction, we really are awfully thin on specialized trades. Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply.

gricardo99 6y ago
Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply. I've heard this time and again over the years, but it doesn't make sense to me. If welders made > 300k/year, surely they wouldn't be in short supply anymore. Why isn't there simply a wage/price signal to compensate for this? It's not like medicine that requires 6-8 years of school, and years more of practice to fill certain positions (where additional constraints are the schools and hospital residencies limited capacity). For welders, labor supply should be fairly easy and quick to remedy.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  I think there's an underestimated resistance to changing the labor rate. If a company quotes a typical job at 80 man-hours with $15/hr welders, and a year later you want to hire welders and can only find them at $20, they're more likely to complain there's a welder shortage and decline jobs because they don't have enough welders to complete them than increase their labor rate. Plus, if you increase the rate for a new guy, and your $12/hr hire from a decade ago hears the new hire is making $20, he's going to be pissed, so you'd have to increase costs across the board or suppress discussion of salaries.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    This explanation doesn't really hold water. Some company is going to eventually win the contract by bidding with $20/hr welders right? It's not like the client is just going to give up on their project.

Lammy 6y ago

This is exactly the reason I think Richard Nixon’s 1973 plan for “1000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000” would have been so impactful for us. It’s hard to get good at only building a handful of something. e: I misremembered; it was actually 1000 by 1980

erentz 6y ago
A thousand! We’d be so rich in carbon free energy we’d be exporting it to Canada and Mexico and still have hundreds of GW left over to, I dunno, produce hydrogen 24/7 for other uses. We could decarbonize our grid today with only something in the vicinity of ~200 new plants. This is entirely doable. France showed how it’s done in the 80s. It’s sad we can’t start now.
- Lammy 6y ago
  Unfortunately that was a very different regulatory era for nuclear development than we have today, so who knows if it would be feasible. Watergate happened not long after that declaration, and one of Gerald Ford’s first major acts as replacement President was signing the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, to split the Atomic Energy Commission (responsible for both civilian and military nuclear development) into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (responsible for regulating civilian nuclear power) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (responsible for supporting military nuclear development).
  - normaljoe 6y ago
    To be fair those are completely different things. Commercial needs a profit and uses low enriched material. Military is not concerned with profit and uses highly enriched material. I am not as familiar with the commercial side but I can say the military model is safe as all get out and produces less waste since you only need to refuel ever few decades or so. Also NRC is very much still involved with Military applications, which at this point just involves moving expensive war ships around.
    - 6y ago

mistrial9 6y ago

I'll give the benefit of the doubt to the parent post here, and add, that in the construction industry in California over the last thirty+ years, the pressure on middle-tier contractors combined with human nature, made a blatant game of taking away the pay from anyone who could not defend themselves in a transaction. That sometimes is the workers, sometimes the suppliers of materials, sometimes the contract holder.. Theft escalated and wages stayed stagnant or actually fell. "Illegal" labor is ordinary and expected. I would welcome some case studies from the commentors here, because "reasons" given in comments are not explaining what I have seen with my own eyes.

csa 6y ago
> "Illegal" labor is ordinary and expected. I agree with your entire comment, but I want to emphasize the part about illegal labor. There are entire industries built on the back of illegal labor, and I think many otherwise informed Americans are not aware of this. We have some fairly substantial mismatches between our labor market and our immigration policies. Before someone says “just don’t use illegal labor”, please realize that this means that you will be out of business due to a lack of competitiveness since literally everyone else in your line of business does it. Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, maybe it’s just better off staying like it is — the market is clearing. On the other hand, I kind of wish proper enforcement of the laws would happen. This would force these companies to pay wages that legal workers would take. This, of course, would require them to raise their prices to the end user, but it would give legal laborers more... of something... definitely money, definitely rights, and maybe a bigger piece of the pie. I don’t work in any of these fields, but I know people who do. I would love to hear from HNers who have first hand experience.
- Lammy 6y ago
  > many otherwise informed Americans It also has to do with conversation venue. Think how many HN commenters work for companies like Uber/Lyft, just for one example.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  There are entire industries built on the back of illegal labor, and I think many otherwise informed Americans are not aware of this. Indeed. The game though, is a big reason for hiring people illegally is to keep costs down. Because illegal workers area afraid to complain and will work for less. Now, when the average moron finds that there are lots of illegals in industry X, or in the country as a whole, they get up in arms about the illegals, support a crackdown but the crackdown doesn't remove the illegals but makes them more afraid, reinforcing the whole system. So the typical ideology of this country makes accomplices of people to the racket when sun light is (selectively) shed on the situation. It's funny that China runs their on the same legal/illegal division of labor but in China the "illegals" are internal to China, people from the countryside who don't have official permission to be in the city.

masklinn 6y ago

> I think a pervasive theme in US infrastructure (and why it's expensive) is that we've gotten out of practice of building. I think it's the deeper "why" to this issue. When it comes to nuclear, that's a problem the world over. Out of practice of designing as well. Look no further than the mess that is the EPR. On its face it seems like a boondoggle, but it makes a lot more sense when you look back at the history of nuclear construction: from 1971 to 1993, France was continuously building plants, first the 34 900MW CP-series (1971 to 1988) then the 20 1300MW P-series (1978 to 1993). The CP-series took 5-6 years to build and the P-series a bit more (6-7). From the mid-70s to the mid 80s, there were a dozen plans being built at any time, and they were being completed. Then came the N4, that thing had serious teething issues, the first model started construction in 1985 but took 12 years to complete. By the time the 4th was completed, it was down to 7 years. But the 4th was the last N4 to be built. It's unclear to me whether the N4 slowdown was intended all along or whether the teething issues made them take a look at construction and pump the brakes, but in the space of 5 years the country went from building 12 plants at a time to building 5, then 4, then 3, then 2, then 1. N4 at least overlapped some with the tail end of the CP-series and the middle of the P-series, but the first EPR construction was started in 2007, 5 years after the last N4 (Civaux 2) was completed. I can't even imagine the loss in institutional knowledge over that span.

m463 6y ago
> When it comes to nuclear, that's a problem the world over. I think there's a perception problem. Do people readily go to school to study nuclear engineering? I don't think it carries a stigma per se, but it would not be that sexy, and it would be harder to get a job and keep it subject to political whim on a 4-year-cycle. (A more practical/guaranteed job would probably be a petroleum engineer, especially wrt fracking)
- 7952 6y ago
  A lot of people are going to be discouraged simply because it sounds and is a difficult subject to study. And not everyone with enthusiasm is going to have the grades.
- 6y ago

wpietri 6y ago

I think another important factor is that to the extent we have people with lots of daily experience, they're not in charge. We've shifted from work-focused to plan-focused behavior. To the extent that we don't even know there's another option. A talk that really opened my eyes was Mary Poppendieck's "Tyranny of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan/ https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of... It turns out the Empire State Building was created on time and under budget, and against a very hard deadline. They did not have a complete plan when they started; they were designing the top floors as they were building the bottom ones. In software, we've become familiar with how over-planning creates a lot of waste. But I was still surprised how broadly that lesson applies.

OldHand2018 6y ago
Commercial skyscrapers get built on time and on budget all the time (in not-California-land, at least). They sign big leases with big tenants before they can get financing, and the building needs to be open when the lease says it will. Strangely enough, pretty much the last thing they do is to design the foundation. Once they know the building is a go, they drill and take core samples at dozens of places around the site and use that information to design a foundation that will hold the building as designed. This is the when things start to cost large amounts of real money, so they don’t do it until they have to. The concrete mat that ties all the caissons together is a single pour that can involve hundreds of concrete trucks and take a day or more to do, all of it orchestrated to ensure every truck arrives exactly on schedule. All this is to say that there is still an awful lot of skill in the construction industry.
- wpietri 6y ago
  I certainly agree there's a lot of skill; my point is more that it's often not running the show. As to on-time/on-budget rates, I'd love to see some data. Significant cost overruns and delays certainly still happen. E.g. this non-CA building was at least 20% over and a year late: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/business/comcast/comcast-tower-cost-overruns-philadelphia-four-seasons-20180418.html https://www.inquirer.com/philly/business/comcast/comcast-tow... And I'll note that the Empire State Building was not a standard office building of the day, but the tallest building in the world. (A title it held for 40 years.) People building today have an 80-year advantage, plus the rise of computers. You'd think we'd be able to do at least as well with every building, but we don't. That's in stark contrast to building safety, for example, where we're very good about learning lessons about keeping buildings from collapsing.

jariel 6y ago

"We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. " No, we definitely have those people. Thinks are more complicated across the board, safety practices are higher, contrary to public opinion wages are higher in this sector and I think there's a soft kind of pervasive corruption going on at the government and contractor layer, where there's just padding, waste, overbidding, back-scratching etc.. Montreal had some serious problems with corruption and was able to make progress on it, states and municipalities need to do the same. I would vote for the first person that wanted to make these things more efficient and transparent.

fatbird 6y ago
"[M]ore efficient and transparent" are at odds with each other. Transparency requires more process and scrutiny and inspection; more of these things increases project risk because bidders need to invest more money in getting the bid, and that increased risk is amortized across successful projects. It also has the effect of favouring entrenched interests and existing players because 1) they know the process, and 2) have the capital to endure longer lead time in sales.

deeeeplearning 6y ago

>They go where the projects go. So where do they go now? Are American trained Mech/Civil/Industrial/etc Engineers really going overseas in large numbers? We all know the cost of schooling is now exorbitant in the US and engineering salaries (certainly for software but I'd guess other disciplines as well) are generally higher here than anywhere else in the world. Where could they even go to make enough to pay off their student loans?

joe_the_user 6y ago

I feel critical of approaches that make generalization using "we" when talking about a serious of actions by some very specific institutions. The US has a complex state and a number of private corporations with a relationship to the state and each other. Who are you talking about in particular? Edit: I should add. It's not just the problem of having trouble building things but companies that get a lot of money out of failure and those companies symbiotic attachment to the government - consider the X billion dollar California rail planing process. Whoever did that didn't even have to create more than minimally to still leave with truckloads of cash. And they'll be on call for next time. Even that is just an example.

dr_dshiv 6y ago

I have an extremely half-baked idea of allowing mutual colonies-- landswaps between countries with special local laws and mobility. This would result in specialized supply chains and labor groupings that would enable, say, groups of Dutch or German brick/stone road builders to operate in America and show us how it's done.