[deadbunny]

This is the problem with destroying industries then trying to keep small remaining pockets of it/restarting it. You lose all of the institutional knowledge, the stuff that isn't written down, the stuff that comes from experience.

This is only exacerbated when those projects you're trying to do become massively over budget and late. People decry it as a waste and a failure, leading to any hard won knowledge being lost yet again as those projects gets scrapped and all the people making it lose their jobs.

You don't get good making things if you only try once every 30 years, you get better by continually doing that thing, passing the hard won knowledge down through the workforce by training incoming people not from hiring "experts" and expecting everyone to be up to speed on project #1 immediately.

[mandevil]

This is what has crippled the Nuclear power plant building industry in most countries (ROK, China, Russia excepted). France built dozens of reactors in the 1970's and into the 1980's, then that slowed and then finally stopped for a decade after Chernobyl. When they tried to build the EPR it's been a huge fiasco of delays and cost overruns. Similarly for the US after 3 Mile Island, the AP1000 in Georgia are the first two power reactors built in the US in 40 years, and massively over-budget and behind schedule. Japan hasn't tried anything since Fukushmia Dai Ichi, but I expect that they will have the exact same problem. The ability to deliver on time and budget was just gone because they didn't have a workforce, and so are having to build that from scratch.

ROK found it easier to become world-class in building power reactors from zero than the US, UK, France and Germany has found it to re-build their capability after a decade (or more) of not constructing any power reactors. And that's true for a lot of these post-industrial industrial policy stuff. It is a lot harder to rebuild once lost than to build the first time.

Russia never stopped producing reactors after Chernobyl, because the USSR was a command economy and the Five Year Plan said that they needed to build a reactor here right now, and so the workers kept working even after the disaster, and now they are one of the few countries that can still deliver nuclear reactors. Note that this is NOT an endorsement of a command economy.