It really does seem relatively easy to raise money in nuclear power for making a few dubious claims about factory production, reactor performance, and delivery timeline.
In the industry, we call the 10 years it takes to realize that it's a lot harder than newcomers initially think, and that the people who tried in the past didn't fail merely because they were idiots who didn't think about economics: "getting run over by the nuclear bus".
After 15 years professionally in the industry, I'm just amazed that Rickover wrote his paper reactor memo back in 1953! https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
Nuclear has actually been a really hard sell for the last few decades, which is why there are so few new plants coming online.
Politicians are opportunistic and short term focused. So they'll back anything that makes them look good and important during the next election cycle. Nuclear projects take too long to complete for them to be interesting. There are some brownie points of course for approving one but it's not the same as the instant gratification you get with renewables where they might see operational solar, wind, batteries, whatever within a single term. Anyway, politicians and the people voting for them are the main target of nuclear lobbying to unlock subsidies, grants, permits, etc.
Those are needed to lure in investors. Investors are more skeptical of course. And these are very risky projects. Time delays and budget overruns are common. By triple digit percentages typically. And the ROI is uncertain too. So, raising money for new nuclear is not that easy. Government support somewhat mitigates the risks but not completely. Which is why there's a lot of talk about nuclear but not a whole lot new capacity coming online for the foreseeable future.
In China, if you're the medium rank politician charged with ensuring that a nuclear reactor gets built in province X, and ten years later there is not an operating nuclear reactor in province X, then the Party tends to get mad. And if they find out you've stolen the money then the consequences can be fatal.
If there's any one thing that's causing a ""decline"" in the west, it's a tolerance for fraud and failure of big projects.
> If there's any one thing that's causing a ""decline"" in the west, it's a tolerance for fraud and failure of big projects.
You should google "Tofu-Dreg". Videos are especially entertaining.
That money get's stolen. You just build it cheaper, get smeared by contractors, employ slaves, etc.
Also, that "tolerance" of the West is surely worth a discussion, but comparing it to the ways a dictatorship enforces their laws and regulations makes it kinda, disturbing.
In China there is tolerance for stealing as long as the job gets done. In the USA there is tolerance for the job not getting done, but not for stealing. I used to think our system was better, but it seems like China gets more done when they accept that there will be some losses to stealing.
Turkey has had the same kind of semantics about getting things done but that recent earthquake did prove fatal though, except in one town where they didn't allow shoddy construction.
> the USA there is tolerance for the job not getting done, but not for stealing.
Well, at that level it's playing loosely with semantics..
The money didn't get pocketed directly, but it got misused to pay a vast amount of costs and salaries with no result. As there are no results, the costs covered can be considered fictional. Which brings us back to bribery and stealing..
This is exactly what I mean. Take the Obamacare exchange website for example. It cost $800 million, didn't work, and nobody got so much as fired for it because that money was wasted, not stolen, and the contract was given out in accordance to procedure. If the execs had pocketed any of that money, they would be in jail.
In China it would have been given to a friend of the bureaucrat in charge of giving out the contract, and they would know it would cost $40 million to build, but they can charge 80 and kickback 10 to the official. And more importantly, that friend would be damn sure to deliver a working website because he knows if he doesn't he will be investigated and punished for his stealing.
So while our system is less "corrupt" I guess, China gets a working website for $80 million when we get a broken one for 10x the cost.
The F-35 program also comes to mind. Or the high speed train effort in California coming in at 10x the price per mile compared to European equivalents..
The F-35 is going to join the long list of fighters that will be pulled from service as quickly as possible.
It might continue to fly in the Air National Guard, and in countries that don't have the means to renew their fleet, where it will have served its purpose: being so costly that it starved any possible competition.
How does it help you if the job is "done" but causes a serious risk to lives?
As I said: the stealing still happens. It's institutionalized in China.
Your system IS better...or at least, for now. China is a dictatorship. Their way of handling "their" people is mad and dangerous. Even if you get things "done", you better be happy that you've been lucky to live in the US and not be afraid that your house may fall apart, or you disappear in some hole in the road.
Is poor construction that needs to be replaced soon worse than no construction at all? I guess that's debatable, but I would have to see actual statistics on Chinese construction failure rates vs the US rather than just a general assumption that China = low quality before it is even worth considering.
> Is poor construction that needs to be replaced soon worse than no construction at all? I guess that's debatable
Replaced? I'm talking about parts of the infrastructure or housing literally falling apart and killing people. You should really follow my advice from above and google "tofu-dreg"
> but I would have to see actual statistics on Chinese construction failure rates
Just watch some of those videos where huge parts of infrastructure just collapse. Those things would have been major news for days in the whole western civilization if it'd happen in the US.
Also, how would you verify (any) statistics coming from China? A country where the whole market is based upon falsified statistics? I mean, that's nothing the regime is proud of. Why would they create true statistics about such failures?
Somehow our leadership convinced us that them facing consequences is a bad idea while they erected a police state that would throw us in a cage if we so much as had a plant they don't like in our pocket.
Leaders need to face the greatest consequences. That's the price of leadership. We have things backward.
Turns out that nuclear plants are like any manufactured widget: building at scale gets costs and time down once you have the workflow down and supply chain stood up.
The "trick" is settling on one standard design and just turning the crank.
The sets { USA } and ¬ { China } aren't equivalent, of course.
I think the extra challenges 'in the west' (UK has a spectacularly famous on-going example, but Europe's experience is closer to the USA's than China's) are a function of safety regulations, and you're obviously not going to suffer the same challenge(s) in a locale that lacks those.
Where you believe your nation's regulations around build & operations sits along the spectrum from sensible to pesky will presumably correlate with how strongly you believe that fission power plants are the (misunderstood / underappreciated) answer.
(I'm in AU and a few minutes after wrapping a decade of federal administration where they never thought or mentioned the idea - the now opposition (conservative) political party started suggesting fission nuclear power was A Great Idea. We're in a unique position here in AU, but this was clearly a political, not a pragmatic, advocacy.)
It wasn't too difficult to build RBMK-1000's in the Soviet either, it was far more difficult to clean up the results though.
I think it'd be immensely interesting to hear of the differences in the EPR reactors built in China (built in 8-9 years) vs the European plants (taking 18years for the finished site in Finland, the French one not finished yet?). On paper the same basic design but twice the build time.
Olk-3 in Finland was first to break ground so were they hampered by being first to be built and fixing build issues as they went along or were issues from Finland just not deemed a problem in China?
So the result of the “fast and loose with regulation around nuclear stuff” is perfectly visible in Germany right now. Low to medium active nuclear waste was deposited in an old salt mine in Lower Saxony. There were strong indications that the mine is structurally unsafe dating back to 1979, but the warnings were ignored. Nuclear waste was dumped in barrels with no further protection. Now, water is seeping into the mine - dissolving the salt which serves as a protective barrier for the radiation and at the same time resulting in a corrosive brine that makes the barrels rust. Plans were drawn up to recover the waste at huge cost, but recently, the water ingress became so high, that it’s doubtful that the mine will survive until recovery can begin. We’ll likely end up with a lot of fun radioactive and poisonous materials in the local aquifers. Cancer rates are already elevated in the region.
In theory, nuclear materials can be handled safely. Sadly, humans.
This has been completely disproven by the entire history of nuclear power.
Rickover's letter about paper versus real reactors has been linked in the comments already. You're talking about paper reactors, but unfortunately we need real reactors if we want electricity.
The consequences already exist, but are not enough to prevent the fraud. The linked article speaks of criminal charges. And here is a CEO going to prison for similar charges of fraud over nuclear construction:
I would claim that the whole construction industry tend to attract fraudsters that are not intimidated by the possibility of jail time. It is, if I remember right, the largest source of human trafficking in the world.
Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers initiates infinite recursion... Specifically, the section on the 'audacious claim' that small modular reactors generate more long-term waste (per unit of energy generated) than much larger traditional reactors does seem to have some support [1], based on issues like irradiation of the support structure (possibly more support structure is needed for many small reactors vs. one big reactor, plus the small structure might get a higher net flux of neutrons), and cases where sodium metal coolant is used as it becomes lowishly radioactive. The tradeoff I suppose is less risk of meltdown in the small modular designs?
The latest pebble-bed SMR designs avoid some of these problems as they use helium as the coolant, but similar efforts in South Africa failed several decades ago as the graphite pebbles broke down and graphite dust (and fuel particles) clogged the system. Now several plants in China and Canada using pebble-bed are currently in the works or operational (notably the one in China passed a natural-cooldown-after-loss-of-power test, i.e. no need to fire up a diesel generator to keep the coolant flowing to prevent meltdown[2]). However, there could be other catastrophic scenarios, as graphite is flammable and when hot reacts with water to form hydrogen. Loss-of-coolant >20% seems bad[3].
"Fact checking" as a means of combating mis/disnformation is kinda doomed from the start. The whole reason you're fact checking in the first place is because some nugget of bullshit was put into some large distribution channel and the damage is already done. Nobody reads the retraction, fact checkers by their very nature have smaller reach than the misinformation they're chasing.
The Wikipedia list of common misconceptions are still common and a lot of them are embarrassingly old if you believe that correcting misinformation is something that's possible to achieve on any scale other then waiting for people to die and hoping the next generation learns the right thing this time round.
We could make it a little less bad by not treating fact checker content the same as the content that it refers to. Google news has a "fact checking" section at the bottom as if it were the same sort of thing as "entertainment" or "science".
If you could subscribe to somebody's fact checking work, it could appear as annotations on the original content that was being checked. You could then either delay that content from showing up in your feed until it was checked, or you could subscribe to retraction related notifications which could be filtered based on whether you browser thinks you actually saw the retracted thing. We could divert some ad revenue to fact checkers (the checkers could be chosen by the users, as a browser setting, and communicated to the ad).
I'm not confident that the protocol that I'm designing for this is any good, but I am confident that the problem won't get any better until we design some kind of protocol for it and bake it into the web at a fundamental level.
And yes, you should do it for yourself also. But there's no reason to do that in a vacuum.
I think that's to do with the idea the fact checkers appeared to move in lockstep with social media trust and safety teams, rather than being independent sources of actual facts.
I don't know if that's true, but that was the reason. It's not about not liking facts. It's about not trusting people who claim to be fact checkers.
I don't disagree with you about the situation regarding fact checking initiatives from social media moderation and safety teams and how their social capital and brand image play out against them.
In that particular case though the sources I provided were (1) an fact checking piece from a well known and respected information household and (2) a detailed and documented rebuttal of how the numbers provided by the other party (something like "millions of people died in Europe from RNA vaccines") were actually wrong.
Even so, you still have to do it. The only alternative is unchecked bullshit, and that is highly corrosive to polite society.
It's basically information guerilla warfare. Lies are cheap and easy to produce, while the facts require investigation and analysis. Lies lead to conspiracy theories which lead to radicalization which lead to destruction of society.
I guess what I'm getting at is that checking bullshit is far less effective than choking it out with the truth. Nobody believes the moon landing happened because they read a fact-checker's piece on the hoax, they believe it because there's so much positive evidence just floating out there that the conspiracy theory can't take hold except in teeny tiny little pockets.
> checking bullshit is far less effective than choking it out with the truth.
Maybe so, but one of the problems is that the bullshit is more often drowning out the truth - so why not do both? Get the truth out there, and push back on bullshit.
The best antidote is speech and information flow. The Covington kid story changed drastically when an unclipped video of what happened came out, for example.
The incentives are against good fact checking. There are 3 broad kinds of misinformation:
1) Stuff that just isn't true and is kinda stupid. Flat earth territory (you can literally see the sea curve, c like). Barely worth debunking because nobody who cares about the truth is going to hold on to an opinion like that, but something for fact checkers to do.
2) Stuff that is not true but has powerful interests pushing it. Like war propaganda. The fact checkers are useless because they tend to get either drowned out or co-opted by someone since the players involved are so big they can corrupt things.
3) Hazy stuff that is plausible where the fact checker probably doesn't know what happened either.
So if the fact checker focuses on accuracy they tend to focus on trivialities, on money they tend to get corrupted and on important stuff they will tend to be wrong about a lot of things. There is no winning that game.
I guess it all depends on the distribution/business model of fact checking. News magazines and classical broadcasting can actually decide what to publish. Other might call it censorship if non-verifiable stuff does not happen there, but that is clearly a matter of scaling and money. I agree that fact checking the internet is useless. However, that is why I heavily rely on our well financed national public broadcasting. In cases that they cannot check, I at least get mostly a disclaimer like 'war party is source of information'.
I'm in the same camp w.r.t. national public broadcasting, but obviously there could be interests there too. It's different in different countries, and one red flag is if an election changes the governing majority and as a result, the leadership of the broadcaster is exchanged (like happened in Poland the previous election and the most recent as well), or if its a more authoritarian country anyway with elections mainly being a sham (like in Russia).
Also, there are fuzzy lines between opinions, consensus, and facts. What may be considered a fact amongst one group will be described as a wrong opinion by another. Chances are, the LLMs will try to work out what group you are in, and present accordingly, without seeking any real truth.
> The whole reason you're fact checking in the first place is because some nugget of bullshit was put into some large distribution channel and the damage is already done.
Selective fact checking that only happens when you're prejudiced against the people who presented the information? Sounds like confrontational activism.
From that article: "In fact, the only real purpose the guidance served was as a justification to suppress Americans’ free speech."
Criticising fact checkers is one thing and can get me partially on board, but any article sprinkling in such conspiracies automatically disqualifies itself to me as it is just clearly a propaganda machine with its own political agenda.
I think you're agreeing with me? I'm not gonna wade into the issue in the link, but assuming its premise for purposes of discussion you have misinformation spread in a channel with a huge amount of reach — official government communications during a crisis, and the people trying to fact check it and correct the record failed miserably even with what they believed to be the truth and scientific evidence on their side.
Sounds to me like you are attacking the source and not the content of the article. Are you saying that he lied under oath and that there was scientific reasoning behind the social distancing directive?
He didn't lie under oath, but both you and the article are extrapolating quite a bit from the testimony of one guy who's not an authoritative source of anything, absence of evidence and all that.
The 6ft (really the 2 meter) rule didn't come from nowhere and does have research backing -- a lot of it going back to the late 1800's. Here's a great overview of the research and history surrounding it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8504878/
Were it gets interesting is that this model of disease transmission doesn't fit covid (and might not fit anything really) but the take-away is the opposite -- that it's actually worse and that 6ft isn't enough. It would be easier to take the criticism leveled from the anti-social distancing crowd seriously if they were arguing for more distance and isolation, not less because that's just fixing wrong with different wrong.
The content of article selectively quotes and frames things to suggest that advice to keep distance to reduce the rate of spread of a severe acute respiratory virus was bad advice.
It was very good advice.
It has been known to be good advice for decades, recent decades.
The fact that this had not been specificly reproven specifically with SARS-CoV-2 during the earliest days of a global outbreak isn't relevant to the value of that advice.
Sturgis, and numerous other outbreaks arising from events in the shit show that exampled the US approach to social distancing highlighted what happened as a result of not heeding such advice ... some of the highest per capita death rates in the world.
First of all you cannot fact check an opinion. You can talk to the person and argue that, *IN YOUR HUMBLE OPINION* they're wrong. You can even present additional information that you think should help the person to change their mind, but you cannot expect it to happen, especially not at once.
Also, it doesn't matter as much WHAT you say but HOW you say it. Approaching someone for a discussion is one thing, attempting to be Einstein that knows everything better and presents everything he says as fact usually creates a defensive demeanor. Especially as journalists, that usually know jack shit about anything and happen to fail to reproduce even simple information correctly when depicting a story.
Then there’s another problem: A lot of people argue with science w/o even remotely understanding what science is. They present a lot of stuff as facts when suddenly a new player appears: progress. And that player can turn a lot of so called “facts” into questionable information. That’s the moment when it’s not about facts anymore but about the question how fast the information traveled and who it reached first.
So while a journalist is still stuck in the past, does fact checks that get a lot of posts/comments deleted on a website, others have already gotten to the new information and are trying to have a discussion on that, which is then successfully prevented by the fact checking journalist. When the new information has reached the journo 12h later, they don’t see themselves being responsible for anything…
But it’s not even that. A lot of science has been tainted by politics/ideology and is not in the least objective anymore, because the people in it are trying to further a political or ideological agenda. Which creates a whole new problem.
I could come up with many more examples here why fact checking is one of the worst ideas in human history, but it all boils down to one question: Who is in possession of the so called truth?
While the idea of fact checking is honorable, the simple information that there is no higher instance that holds the “ultimate truth” and that is not “politically or ideologically tainted” in one way or another should make it clear to anyone how bad the idea is once it’s put into action.
Not to mention how tinfoil hat connoisseurs behave once a fact check turns out to be wrong.
In the industry, we call the 10 years it takes to realize that it's a lot harder than newcomers initially think, and that the people who tried in the past didn't fail merely because they were idiots who didn't think about economics: "getting run over by the nuclear bus".
After 15 years professionally in the industry, I'm just amazed that Rickover wrote his paper reactor memo back in 1953! https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html