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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
acidburnNSA|1 year ago
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
jillesvangurp|1 year ago
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.
DeathArrow|1 year ago
wordofx|1 year ago
wordofx|1 year ago
[deleted]
anoy8888|1 year ago
epistasis|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
verisimi|1 year ago
photochemsyn|1 year ago
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...
Spivak|1 year ago
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.
__MatrixMan__|1 year ago
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.
johnchristopher|1 year ago
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.
jandrese|1 year ago
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.
roenxi|1 year ago
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.
toenail|1 year ago
Selective fact checking that only happens when you're prejudiced against the people who presented the information? Sounds like confrontational activism.
SV_BubbleTime|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
Grimeton|1 year ago
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.