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Nuclear is always late and over budget in the West because everyone who knows how to build reactors is long dead or retired. Thats what get when you loose skil

Nuclear is always late and over budget in the West because everyone who knows how to build reactors is long dead or retired. Thats what get when you loose skilled workforce. We are incompetent at building all kinds of infrastructure - UK completed crossrail almost 10 years late,and HS2 is 3x overbudget. This country invented railways! California also can't build a railway apparently. I am not sure how a functional country continues on this trajectory

samatman 4y ago
The lack of industrial capacity is almost purely due to regulatory cost disease. When you look at industries allowed to be profitable, they go and build things like the Bakkan oil fields. It's perverse that we regulate nuclear out of existence and build sprawling fracking infrastructure instead, and allow a dysfunctional political process to kill rail in California. But it's 100% about regulation. US nuclear engineers are old? Great, Chinese ones aren't and we can pay them more. We hire them, problem solved.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  The mindset that blames regulation is the same mindset that created this problem in the first place. It's the neoliberal fantasy that world of atoms doesn't matter, and skills of the population doesn't matter. You can't magic your way out of a problem just because you have a fat bank account. You can't hire 50 nuclear engineers into an organisation that never built anything of that complexity, with no suppply chain and no manufacturing infrastructure. You can't get natural if you have no pipelines or LNG terminals. Whem climate-change related droughts cause food shortages and countries ban exports, your bank account wont help you either Money is just an abstraction, and it does a big correction every time suppy chains or markets faulter
afarrell 4y ago
It would be great if the US navy had floating nuclear power plants that they were willing to sail into Helsinki, Bremerhaven, or Portsmouth to provide additional power to our allies during this winter.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Well, there's a new LNG terminal opening RSN on the southern coast of Finland, so there's that.
schnitzelstoat 4y ago
Yeah, we are losing/have lost a lot of our engineering skillbase. It's no surprise when you can make way more money getting people to click on ads at Facebook or working at Goldman Sachs etc. than you can in engineering.
throwawayffffas 4y ago
The skilled workforce and the know-how exists. It's all about perverse incentives. Why would a company deliver something in x years for y dollars when it can delivery it 10 years later for 3 times the money? The problem is delays are not penalized but rewarded due to the perverse way government contracting works. Do you think they would be late if the budget was fixed when they signed they contract?

samatman 4y ago

The lack of industrial capacity is almost purely due to regulatory cost disease. When you look at industries allowed to be profitable, they go and build things like the Bakkan oil fields. It's perverse that we regulate nuclear out of existence and build sprawling fracking infrastructure instead, and allow a dysfunctional political process to kill rail in California. But it's 100% about regulation. US nuclear engineers are old? Great, Chinese ones aren't and we can pay them more. We hire them, problem solved.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
The mindset that blames regulation is the same mindset that created this problem in the first place. It's the neoliberal fantasy that world of atoms doesn't matter, and skills of the population doesn't matter. You can't magic your way out of a problem just because you have a fat bank account. You can't hire 50 nuclear engineers into an organisation that never built anything of that complexity, with no suppply chain and no manufacturing infrastructure. You can't get natural if you have no pipelines or LNG terminals. Whem climate-change related droughts cause food shortages and countries ban exports, your bank account wont help you either Money is just an abstraction, and it does a big correction every time suppy chains or markets faulter

afarrell 4y ago

It would be great if the US navy had floating nuclear power plants that they were willing to sail into Helsinki, Bremerhaven, or Portsmouth to provide additional power to our allies during this winter.

euroderf 4y ago
Well, there's a new LNG terminal opening RSN on the southern coast of Finland, so there's that.

schnitzelstoat 4y ago

Yeah, we are losing/have lost a lot of our engineering skillbase. It's no surprise when you can make way more money getting people to click on ads at Facebook or working at Goldman Sachs etc. than you can in engineering.

throwawayffffas 4y ago

The skilled workforce and the know-how exists. It's all about perverse incentives. Why would a company deliver something in x years for y dollars when it can delivery it 10 years later for 3 times the money? The problem is delays are not penalized but rewarded due to the perverse way government contracting works. Do you think they would be late if the budget was fixed when they signed they contract?