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Wow this is brutal but feels like it's correct. What a frightening state of affairs. Is the construction industry really so corrupt? Is government and industry

Wow this is brutal but feels like it's correct. What a frightening state of affairs. Is the construction industry really so corrupt? Is government and industry unaware or unwilling/unable to detect this earlier and stop it?

hunter-gatherer 5y ago
I spent some fair amount of years as both a government employee in DoD and then some years as a defense contractor amd I can tell you the military industrial complex is a real thing. In my contracting days I worked with a handful of DoE engineers that were more familiar with reactor projects and as I understood it, reactor peojects basically follow the same type of workflow as any big DoD prohect. So OPs comment is much in line with my understanding of the issue. It is an unfortunate state of affairs.
- willis936 5y ago
  I've worked in fusion research and defense. MIC corruption and incompetance is quite high but virtually not present in the fusion research community. The researchers, you know, give a shit. They're not there to make a buck and milk the gravy train. If a machine gets greenlit then they pour everything into getting it to succeed because it might be the only research advancement greenlit in their life. Failure is always an option. Look at NCSX.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    The fusion researchers are not who would finance a fusion reactor. The people who finance those would be the ones financing fission plants, and then milking the project for as long as it can be made to run. Since nobody expects a fusion plant construction project to take less than 20 years and $50B after it is proved possible, they will be on it like flies.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    What the fusion research community has instead is people who have committed their careers or even lives to a particular field. Getting them to admit they made a mistake is very hard. What did Upton Sinclair say? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Most of them will rationalize as hard as they can for as long as they can. You sometimes see bitter comments when they are approaching or are in retirement.
rsynnott 5y ago
This seems... dubious at best? In terms of large nuclear reactor projects recently, we have the Finnish and Flamanville ones as examples of major overruns... but they're the first two examples of a type. Other EPR builds are going much better; one of the Chinese ones is finished and the UK one is basically on track. The timing was bad, in that EPR starts coincided with a general loss of interest in nuclear over Fukushima, but there's nothing too unusual here. Historically the first build of a type has _generally_ been problematic.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  It is, anyway, a bigger problem in the US than in some other places, and, in the US, a bigger problem in public projects than in private projects. So, we see it operating today on NASA's SLS rocket, but not on SpaceX's Starship. But there has never been a privately financed nuke plant.

hunter-gatherer 5y ago

I spent some fair amount of years as both a government employee in DoD and then some years as a defense contractor amd I can tell you the military industrial complex is a real thing. In my contracting days I worked with a handful of DoE engineers that were more familiar with reactor projects and as I understood it, reactor peojects basically follow the same type of workflow as any big DoD prohect. So OPs comment is much in line with my understanding of the issue. It is an unfortunate state of affairs.

willis936 5y ago
I've worked in fusion research and defense. MIC corruption and incompetance is quite high but virtually not present in the fusion research community. The researchers, you know, give a shit. They're not there to make a buck and milk the gravy train. If a machine gets greenlit then they pour everything into getting it to succeed because it might be the only research advancement greenlit in their life. Failure is always an option. Look at NCSX.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  The fusion researchers are not who would finance a fusion reactor. The people who finance those would be the ones financing fission plants, and then milking the project for as long as it can be made to run. Since nobody expects a fusion plant construction project to take less than 20 years and $50B after it is proved possible, they will be on it like flies.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  What the fusion research community has instead is people who have committed their careers or even lives to a particular field. Getting them to admit they made a mistake is very hard. What did Upton Sinclair say? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Most of them will rationalize as hard as they can for as long as they can. You sometimes see bitter comments when they are approaching or are in retirement.

rsynnott 5y ago

This seems... dubious at best? In terms of large nuclear reactor projects recently, we have the Finnish and Flamanville ones as examples of major overruns... but they're the first two examples of a type. Other EPR builds are going much better; one of the Chinese ones is finished and the UK one is basically on track. The timing was bad, in that EPR starts coincided with a general loss of interest in nuclear over Fukushima, but there's nothing too unusual here. Historically the first build of a type has _generally_ been problematic.

ncmncm 5y ago
It is, anyway, a bigger problem in the US than in some other places, and, in the US, a bigger problem in public projects than in private projects. So, we see it operating today on NASA's SLS rocket, but not on SpaceX's Starship. But there has never been a privately financed nuke plant.