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Comment by biren34 | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't this question be asked in a larger context? Since the moon landing, pretty much every major government-led initiative has been less successful than the one before, as far as I can think of. (Admittedly this is my "general sense" and not based on any exhaustive research).

Is nuclear power special? I don't think so. I think it's just more sensitive to the various pathologies that have crept into the US political system over the past 5 decades.

If I wrote a history of modern technology since 1960, my first guess at a theme would be "the government led the development of many major new technologies then people decided it wasn't good at this, and it passed all the profits on to private companies--who then stopped working on big breakthroughs (mostly)"

Again, maybe I'm wrong, but that's my hypothesis.

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Yep. For example, here in Stockholm they recently built a new regional hospital. It turned out to be many times over budget and is one of the most expensive buildings in the world with a total construction cost exceeding that of Burj Khalifa.

The book review doesn't mention New Public Management which I think is odd. Nuclear construction costs started to skyrocket at precisely the time NPM became vogue. NPM states that governments are bad at doing stuff and should do as little as possible. Everything governments need should be acquired from private companies who bid for contracts. Lowest bidders win.

This almost never works because companies' motives are different from governments'. The government wants the nuclear plant built on time. The company who won the contract doesn't mind if it takes twice as long because that could mean twice the profit. So governments respond by adding more stipulations and regulations to the contracts which only makes it easier for companies to find exploitable loopholes in them to extract more tax-payer money.

As in any big government-connected project in the US, today, whether it involves tunnels (Big Dig, 2nd Ave subway, Yucca Mountain), military procurement (F-35, literally dozens of others), manned spaceflight (STS, ISS, SLS) or construction projects, notably nuke plants and "high-speed rail", and even fusion "research", waste and cost overruns are not problems.

Rather, they are the whole point of the projects. They provide a steady, voluminous, years-long, indictment-proof flow of public money to select private pockets under control of select politicians. Initial cost estimates are always entirely fictional, with no intention ever to deliver anything at the promised price.

This is a reason why "small modular nuke" has never gained traction in the US: there is just not enough scope for massive wholly-legal corruption.

It has taken many decades, but the US has achieved world domination in high-level legalized corruption. It is largely impossible for honest, legitimate projects to compete for backers, except, lately, solar and wind power farms, which can be built very quickly and start delivering power before they are even finished.

Reminds me of a certain “High-Speed Rail to Nowhere” trying to gain traction as a perpetual sink of taxpayers’ money.

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