Re:Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power
by throwanem on Thursday March 30, 2017 @08:12AM
(#13994668)
Probably, but it's also intuitively obvious to anyone who's owned a car, or a house, or otherwise been responsible for the function of any reasonably complex machine. Things wear out. Things break. They have to be repaired or replaced if the process of which they're a part is to continue.
Knowledge is a crucial part of that, too. The Saturn rocket program is a great example - if we decided to go back to the moon tomorrow, we'd be a decade or more in the doing of it, because all the people who knew how to build those rockets, and the tools to build those rockets, and the tools to build those tools, and so on - are by now retired or deceased. We'd have to figure all that stuff out all over again, as nearly from scratch as makes no odds. There's no reason to imagine any other similarly complex technology would be different.
Knowledge is a crucial part of that, too. The Saturn rocket program is a great example - if we decided to go back to the moon tomorrow, we'd be a decade or more in the doing of it, because all the people who knew how to build those rockets, and the tools to build those rockets, and the tools to build those tools, and so on - are by now retired or deceased. We'd have to figure all that stuff out all over again, as nearly from scratch as makes no odds. There's no reason to imagine any other similarly complex technology would be different.