I would welcome some case studies from the commentors here, because "reasons" given in comments are not explaining what I have seen with my own eyes.
I agree with your entire comment, but I want to emphasize the part about illegal labor.
There are entire industries built on the back of illegal labor, and I think many otherwise informed Americans are not aware of this.
We have some fairly substantial mismatches between our labor market and our immigration policies.
Before someone says “just don’t use illegal labor”, please realize that this means that you will be out of business due to a lack of competitiveness since literally everyone else in your line of business does it.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, maybe it’s just better off staying like it is — the market is clearing. On the other hand, I kind of wish proper enforcement of the laws would happen. This would force these companies to pay wages that legal workers would take. This, of course, would require them to raise their prices to the end user, but it would give legal laborers more... of something... definitely money, definitely rights, and maybe a bigger piece of the pie.
I don’t work in any of these fields, but I know people who do. I would love to hear from HNers who have first hand experience.
Indeed. The game though, is a big reason for hiring people illegally is to keep costs down. Because illegal workers area afraid to complain and will work for less.
Now, when the average moron finds that there are lots of illegals in industry X, or in the country as a whole, they get up in arms about the illegals, support a crackdown but the crackdown doesn't remove the illegals but makes them more afraid, reinforcing the whole system. So the typical ideology of this country makes accomplices of people to the racket when sun light is (selectively) shed on the situation.
It's funny that China runs their on the same legal/illegal division of labor but in China the "illegals" are internal to China, people from the countryside who don't have official permission to be in the city.
One can imagine the several decades of law enforcement that would be required to change this situation, but it is an open question whether it would be a good thing overall.
It also has to do with conversation venue. Think how many HN commenters work for companies like Uber/Lyft, just for one example.
e: I misremembered; it was actually 1000 by 1980
We could decarbonize our grid today with only something in the vicinity of ~200 new plants. This is entirely doable. France showed how it’s done in the 80s. It’s sad we can’t start now.
I am not as familiar with the commercial side but I can say the military model is safe as all get out and produces less waste since you only need to refuel ever few decades or so.
Also NRC is very much still involved with Military applications, which at this point just involves moving expensive war ships around.
But do nuclear reactors really produce any waste, or only “spent” fuel that’s recyclable?
Granted the too high mark could still be perfectly fine to throw into a landfill and not impact anything, but nobody wants that in their neighborhood.
As to high level stuff which is what you are asking about, the spent stuff is really hot. To recycle, it would need to cool down first. Commercial plants place that in cooling pools, which is kind of bad if you have a Tsunami hit your plant (Japan), our something else.
So as to the waste element think I have 2% enriched object that is 100 cubic meters. The same in a highly enriched say 90% would only be about 2 cubic meters. This means my pools would be smaller, my overall size is smaller, and I can contain the smaller pool easier preventing the release.
On the politics side the idea of highly enriched is dangerous because it could be used for other purposes, however when those decisions were made I don't think anyone every imagined the concept of a dirty bomb in which enrichment is really going to matter one bit.
But besides that there is always waste. The key part is understanding what level of waste. There's a fair amount of low level waste (low radiation levels). In fact, this is like 90% of total waste (even more if you count my volume). But this type of waste is not the kind people are typically concerned with because it isn't radioactive for long nor is it producing dangerous levels. These types are not really recyclable though (concrete, steel beams, etc).
I do suggest reading up on our own AcidburnNSA's post about waste[0]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chrono-parc-nucleair...
Start with engineering courses, bringing on new talent. Spin up hundreds of solar farms, battery factories etc
My question is are there real innovations to be made - do we need to rely on concrete and steel ? Are new homes possible in flat packs?
I would rather packet it into small parcels (10-100M) that explore the phase space of possible than think a quick government report can define infrastructure for a century
On top of which we should heed the strong town lesson - only build what we need, and cost in the car externalities in our cities.
Just thinking out loud ...
You will still need engineers for improving the technology, you will be on the bleeding edge. You will still need maintenance crews, the constructors are the ones that know the most about what they built, why not train them to maintain it as well?
First - 'Green New Deal' is a slogan, not anything material that helps fix underlying operational problems.
Second - we don't need to 'rebuild' most things, we need to fix, maintain.
Third - this is not an issue with 'green' or 'innovation' in the technical sense - it's about the efficiency of the bureaucracy.
Fourth - 'All the wasted money' is going into the pockets of seriously powerful vested interests - they are not interested in reform.
Are you ready for the political cost of taking on the Unions? Esp. public sector unions? They may not have their fingers in the pot, but they still likely a massive barrier.
What about exposing the fact that a ton of workers in infrastructure are in the country illegally? Who's going to 'clamp down' on that and pay the political price?
What about the fact that all these firms are massive political donors to the powers that be? How do we solve that one?
And fighting entities: SF is a tiny city. So is Palo Alto. So is Oakland. The 'Bay Area' needs coordination and nobody really wants to give up their little fiefdoms of power. So there are a lot of problems like that.
The issues are complex and a lot of it has to do with vested interests and power, not 'technology' or anything like that.
> What about exposing the fact that a ton of workers in infrastructure are in the country illegally? Who's going to 'clamp down' on that and pay the political price?
Unions are going to clamp down and pay the political price of squashing illegal labor. That's their whole purpose of existing! Anti-union sentiment in America reflects significant cognitive dissonance on this issue.
Public unions are a different matter. They're entrenched largely because private sector unions have disappeared. With greater private sector unionization public employees wouldn't dominate union lobbying as much as they do, and politicians wouldn't feel as obliged to protect them if there existed a larger pool of well paying, stable private sector jobs for the working class.
The entire discussion has been how this isn't the major driving factor of the cost of building. So why bring this up at all?
When it comes to nuclear, that's a problem the world over. Out of practice of designing as well. Look no further than the mess that is the EPR. On its face it seems like a boondoggle, but it makes a lot more sense when you look back at the history of nuclear construction: from 1971 to 1993, France was continuously building plants, first the 34 900MW CP-series (1971 to 1988) then the 20 1300MW P-series (1978 to 1993). The CP-series took 5-6 years to build and the P-series a bit more (6-7). From the mid-70s to the mid 80s, there were a dozen plans being built at any time, and they were being completed.
Then came the N4, that thing had serious teething issues, the first model started construction in 1985 but took 12 years to complete. By the time the 4th was completed, it was down to 7 years. But the 4th was the last N4 to be built. It's unclear to me whether the N4 slowdown was intended all along or whether the teething issues made them take a look at construction and pump the brakes, but in the space of 5 years the country went from building 12 plants at a time to building 5, then 4, then 3, then 2, then 1.
N4 at least overlapped some with the tail end of the CP-series and the middle of the P-series, but the first EPR construction was started in 2007, 5 years after the last N4 (Civaux 2) was completed. I can't even imagine the loss in institutional knowledge over that span.
I think there's a perception problem.
Do people readily go to school to study nuclear engineering?
I don't think it carries a stigma per se, but it would not be that sexy, and it would be harder to get a job and keep it subject to political whim on a 4-year-cycle.
(A more practical/guaranteed job would probably be a petroleum engineer, especially wrt fracking)
Yes, people do study nuclear engineering. I was considering that path myself in university, but ended up going more towards science and doing several years of research in nuclear physics labs instead.
I'm very glad I didn't end up doing nuclear engineering. The nuclear industry stagnated and failed to address cost problems and bad project delivery (cost overruns, delays, etc).
And then between 2010 and 2020 renewable energy scaled up and became incredibly cheap, in fact the cheapest source of energy in most countries: https://about.bnef.com/blog/scale-up-of-solar-and-wind-puts-...
Between 2010 to 2019 wind energy become 70% cheaper and solar became 89% cheaper: https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png
Battery costs have dropped 75% over the last 6 years: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...
> I think there's a perception problem.
Somewhat, but the nuclear industry did a massive PR campaign to address that.
Blaming perception or "green activists" or "fear of scawy radiashun!" is an easy straw-man for them, but the real obstacles are more practical and harder to address: the economics of nuclear are not good. This is compounded by a problematic history of delivery problems.
> Yes, people do study nuclear engineering.
Note I said "readily" not "really". I see you made the calcluation when you made your decision.
It's a shame really because I believe nuclear power has great promise in benefitting society.
Too bad the moonshot level investment in nuclear went towards military ends (france in 80's excepted). And too bad funding is dependent on political whim.
Although solar and wind is working, I worry that might be a "save ourselves rich" strategy.
When you look at this table:
material energy density mj/kg
Uranium 22,394,000,000
Diesel fuel 38.6
Lithium-ion battery 2.63
Loan guarantees are a particularly common example -- for example, last year the US govt provided $3.7 BILLION in loan guarantees for the troubled Vogtle reactor builds in Georgia. The way loan guarantees work is that the government agrees to pay the debt owed if the company goes bankrupt or cannot complete the project; this is surprisingly common actually, since the same project had already driven Westignhouse to file bankruptcy.
Solar and wind aren't likely to make a handful of people extremely rich -- the profit margins on the components are pretty low due to the high degree of competition pushing them down. Building solar and wind farms to sell their power does produce a solid and reliable financial return on investment, but it's still less than 10% (even though the energy return on investment is good).
> When you look at this table [energy density]
For power generation, energy density is largely irrelevant.
Also these energy densities are apples-to-oranges comparisons. You can't burn uranium without a fairly large, heavy reactor. There are no "nuclear cars." Similarly diesel requires an engine although it's smaller. Batteries aren't a power source on their own, they're storage, and you're not "burning" them up.
i)getting people trained, ii)having a kind-of minimum wage accessible to many people.
And there's plenty of training courses at the local caterer center and community college for both those jobs at reasonable rates. Local manufacturers often pay hourly+tuition for their best fabricators or line workers who want a promotion to the welder position to go through one of those programs.
There's lots of welding schools churning out 'graduates' throughout the year. Welders are almost always the first guys laid off in shops.
The 'learn to code' thing thrown around would be better.
The whole narrative of producing more 'software developers' in general though? No thank you. I see enough people coming off of less than stellar bootcamps (there are, in fact, good ones, though I'm finding this less true over time) who just see dollar signs who have no interest in this as a craft. I don't want to encourage that, at all.
In fact, I want certification for the title of Software Engineer, no different than having to be certified like civil engineers do. Uncle Bob is right about this one.
A talk that really opened my eyes was Mary Poppendieck's "Tyranny of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...
It turns out the Empire State Building was created on time and under budget, and against a very hard deadline. They did not have a complete plan when they started; they were designing the top floors as they were building the bottom ones.
In software, we've become familiar with how over-planning creates a lot of waste. But I was still surprised how broadly that lesson applies.
They sign big leases with big tenants before they can get financing, and the building needs to be open when the lease says it will.
Strangely enough, pretty much the last thing they do is to design the foundation. Once they know the building is a go, they drill and take core samples at dozens of places around the site and use that information to design a foundation that will hold the building as designed. This is the when things start to cost large amounts of real money, so they don’t do it until they have to.
The concrete mat that ties all the caissons together is a single pour that can involve hundreds of concrete trucks and take a day or more to do, all of it orchestrated to ensure every truck arrives exactly on schedule.
All this is to say that there is still an awful lot of skill in the construction industry.
And I'll note that the Empire State Building was not a standard office building of the day, but the tallest building in the world. (A title it held for 40 years.) People building today have an 80-year advantage, plus the rise of computers. You'd think we'd be able to do at least as well with every building, but we don't. That's in stark contrast to building safety, for example, where we're very good about learning lessons about keeping buildings from collapsing.
Luckily for the nuclear industry, the engineering capability still exists in the US to design a whole plant, and a lot of the manufacturing base still exists. Big US nuclear players have had a base load of domestic upgrades and international new plant jobs that have kept these capabilities alive.
But for construction, we really are awfully thin on specialized trades. Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply.
Welders, especially, are _always_ in short supply.
A few months at the local community college can get you to the point where you can do the most basic welding jobs, but these low skill jobs are the ones that either left the US or got automated, and the few such jobs that remain are mostly done by mediocre welders who should have retired years ago. If you want to do the high skilled welding that pays well, you need to essentially support yourself for years as you develop those skills on your own - and most people who have the means to do so have better opportunities in other fields.
Realistically, employers need to eat the cost of training new people if they want the pipeline to open back up again, but it's more economical to poach a good welder after some other sucker puts their resources into them, so you get a classic tragedy of the commons.
People look at the small difference between pay at the factory or mine (dangerous) and pay at Walmart (not quite as dangerous + employee discounts) and make the rational choice.
During the 2010-2019 US recovery wage stickiness was noticed, even with everyone complaining about not being able to find qualified workers. Companies were very reticent about increasing wages, often preferring to go with signing bonuses.
It is suggested that this reticence/stickiness was because after 2008-2009 GFC many places were stuck with high wages (from the previous boom), and getting people to cut their salaries was almost impossible.
* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sticky-wage-theory.asp
Source: used to weld at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego.
When welding, you put an incredible amount of heat into the material. This causes it to move in real time. A welder needs to predict how it will move ant actively account for this so that the final piece winds up in the right condition. The tolerances depend on the application - for furniture who cares if it's out a bit, for a coolant line to a reactor you need it to be damn near perfect.
Then there's heat penetration - adding heat to the material changes its material properties. Go too slow and steel becomes excessively weak, go too fast and you don't form a strong bond. Again, big differences between "probably won't break if you sit on it" and "this will kill a dozen people if it fails"
Finally, there's just plain old margin for error. If you're welding together consumer products, it doesn't matter if you scrap one every now and then. However if you're trying to join together two multi-million dollar custom fabrications, you need someone who's going to walk up to this and get it on the first try every time.
I'd compare it less to being a major league baseball player and more to being a professional musician - you can't determine that someone could never do it, but some people are certainly born with a knack for it and you can't simply churn out more on a whim.
In short supply for the wages offered. Bid enough out there, and the positions will fill. Bid consistently such that precarity is avoided and bid even more beyond that, and the bench will deepen. Short supply is entirely addressable by buyers.
There are definitely some industries where the cost to get to the level where you make good money is too high, especially when you aren't sure when you start if you have the required talent to make a great living.
There will always be a shortage of great NBA centres - for reasons outside labour market functioning.
There is only ever a shortage of sufficient compensation to clear the market for a desired level of skills availability.
There are vested interests waging a war against the US building infrastructure because its ideologically against the narrative developed.
"Starve the beast" has turned any kind of fiscal spending into a huge political battle. It used to be, funding basic things was just a given. Now it's a fight over every little dollar.
In approximately 61 days, conservatives in the US will be in an absolute panic about the financial state of the country.
The US has full ability to pay such debts, at the cost of inflation.
Large deficits would be fine if the spending were for investments with a high ROI, such as infrastructure or nuclear power.
Indeed, going further into debt for an investment with great ROI makes sense. Regardless of the debt level, a good investment is a good investment. And a bad investment is a bad investment.
Alas, most spending of the US federal government isn't an investment of any type.
That point could reasonably be interpreted as rather than taking in a dollar and paying back 50 cents, the US has the power to take in an hour of labour and pay back a half hour. And claim that it fulfilled the terms of the agreement.
That isn't an improvement. It is nothing more than muddying the waters enough it makes it hard to point out that the situation is no different from a default. Which I suppose is why they do it.
There is an amount of stuff in the world at this moment. The US either gives back more stuff than it borrowed, or less. The idea that it can give back less stuff but that is OK because it is a government is a foolish idea. Making it hard to understand who is getting what doesn't magically mean everyone is happy, it just means we only find out who is paying with benefit of hindsight.
Anyone can pay back less real value if they have terms where the rate of interest is lower than the real rate of inflation.
Creditors of a government can mitigate the risk of that happening due to the policies of the debtor government by setting repayment terms other than in fiat currency of the debtor.
They often choose not to; heck, in the case of the US, it's happened that they choose to lend despite negative nominal rates, even before inflation.
Unless you consider being the sovereign issuer of the world's reserve currency, and the military, civil government, legal system, and property rights behind that to be an investment of some type.
Education could be an investment but per student spending has tripled over 50 years, yet it would be hard to argue that there is a high marginal return on investment from the extra spending.
Same with healthcare. Plenty have noted that the US spends more per capita but has worse outcomes. Seems like there's simultaneously cheaper and more effective approaches out there.
Social security is just a transfer payment, but not sustainably structured.
You mean those who actually pay taxes? The top 10% pays 70% of all federal tax.
The most current tax cuts also lowered the brackets in almost all cases, as well as raising the standard deduction. These changes reduced taxes for almost every American.
> In approximately 61 days, conservatives in the US will be in an absolute panic about the financial state of the country.
As opposed to the last 4 years where democrats in the US were in an absolute panic about everything.
> Deutsche Bank’s Torsten Sløk says that the distribution of household wealth in America has become even more disproportionate over the past decade, with the richest 10% of U.S. households representing 70% of all U.S. wealth in 2018, compared with 60% in 1989, according to a recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve. [1]
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2019017pap...
Unless a bank is in trouble or someone wants to fight a war.
unless that spending is on them. That subsection of the population LOVES welfare when they get it and it's called something else. You could just call this something other than welfare.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-f-kennedy-communit_n_6...
Excess on all sides
Strangely though "Defund the police" goes the other way, politically. /ducks
Oh of course! It's the Republicans' fault, how predictable. If only we had a Democrat utopia like California at a national level, we'd have nuclear plants everywhere and everything would be perfect.
So where do they go now? Are American trained Mech/Civil/Industrial/etc Engineers really going overseas in large numbers? We all know the cost of schooling is now exorbitant in the US and engineering salaries (certainly for software but I'd guess other disciplines as well) are generally higher here than anywhere else in the world. Where could they even go to make enough to pay off their student loans?
No, we definitely have those people.
Thinks are more complicated across the board, safety practices are higher, contrary to public opinion wages are higher in this sector and I think there's a soft kind of pervasive corruption going on at the government and contractor layer, where there's just padding, waste, overbidding, back-scratching etc..
Montreal had some serious problems with corruption and was able to make progress on it, states and municipalities need to do the same.
I would vote for the first person that wanted to make these things more efficient and transparent.
The US has a complex state and a number of private corporations with a relationship to the state and each other. Who are you talking about in particular?
Edit: I should add. It's not just the problem of having trouble building things but companies that get a lot of money out of failure and those companies symbiotic attachment to the government - consider the X billion dollar California rail planing process. Whoever did that didn't even have to create more than minimally to still leave with truckloads of cash. And they'll be on call for next time. Even that is just an example.
We no longer have a broad reservoir/cadre/pool of practitioners of engineers, construction crews, experts, designers (except for a very concentrated few) who do this week in, week out. Every job now seems custom. Only Parsons or whoever has the ability to do it, and even they have to scrounge around for the project manager.
Other countries are in their building phase and have thousands of engineers who are practiced in standardizing designs and squeezing out inefficiencies. They have graduating classes full of highway engineers. For gods sake, they even have graduating classes full of engineers specializing in the tooling for highway / railroad engineering machinery.
Our building phase was post-war construction-crazy economic expansion era. Now we're in the maintenance phase, where big new projects are the exception. Not to denigrate the great importance of doing great maintenance, but in practice you can't keep (or attract) a large pool of well paid expert engineers going on that level of activity. They go where the projects go.
And as a result, as the report points out, when everything is "for the first time again" and custom because you do it once per decade, the particular factors of a given site are allowed to dictate what the system design should be. (Maybe also not insignificant: the environmental considerations allowed to creep in, just to point that out, as grateful as I am for the protection that we give these matters). Rather than (for better or worse, probably a bit worse) in other countries, they're stamping out highways, railroad, power plants by the week, and the environment is made to fit the construction.
It's choices we made, over time, that caused us to atrophy our capabilities here. It could be brought back with investment.