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
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.
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.
Edit: found a really interesting backgrounder on details of the Chinese nuclear programme. https://world-nuclear.org/Information-Library/Country-Profil...
Up until the mid-00s Japan was building quite a few plants as well, and they took about 4-5 years from breaking ground to commercial operation:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
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.
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.)
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?
https://www.powermag.com/former-scana-ceo-will-land-in-priso...
Nuclear projects tend to attract fraudsters that are not intimidated by the possibility of jail time.
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].
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/interview-small-modular-reac...
[2] https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/chinas-htr-pm-reacto...
"Three-dimensional modeling and loss-of-coolant accident analysis of high temperature gas cooled reactor" [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...
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.
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.
People like that are not in the fight because of some facts they disagree with, it's about raging against the Man for other reasons.
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.
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.
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.
Selective fact checking that only happens when you're prejudiced against the people who presented the information? Sounds like confrontational activism.
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.
