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The west’s engineering skills are not in decline, though if you have a metric that indicates that, it would be interesting. Europe has not had USA-level problems with building a popular rail network, or other major works.

The main differences in costs and time from 150 years ago are:

(A) Accounting for Extrinsic Costs. as the nations have become more dense and more democratic, peoples voices need to be heard. Environmental, wildlife habitat, etc. are complex issues that have only become important in recent decades. People sometimes get tempted by authoritarian rule because they “get shit done cheaply”, but this is a ruse. By not engaging openly, there are often massive extrinsic costs, so the project is “cheap” by cheating and not counting the true costs. Europe seems to have streamlined this, the USA is still stuck in “might over right” political power struggles rather than compromises.

(B) Cheap labor. Most infrastructure doesn’t require large numbers of high skilled labor, it needs a mix of skilled and unskilled labor. The railways in the 1800s we’re built with large quantities of immigrant labor. This is in rarer supply in the West these days, for a variety of reasons.

(C) Labor rights and safety. Construction projects and rail projects were happy to bury dead workers by the wayside (or in the concrete of the Empire State Building). Or work them to unsustainable hours with limited pay. It took many strikes, some violent, to sort this out. Today’s standards don’t put up with that level of labor abuse.

(D) Investment sources. Many large projects were state funded, or were funded by investors with a lot of patience. That kind of patience is in short supply, as is state funding in the USA due to Republicans being Republicans. Europe seems to be able to pull this kind of funding off.

(E) Contract Grift. There is a lot more incentive and skill to slow roll and milk the cash flow of construction projects, given their complexity. Traditional large works were more vertically integrated and managed by those with incentive to see the job done, rather than paid by the hour. The solution to this is more vertical integration but that’s hard to pull off because of labor shortages.

I’d also note that China has a vested interest in publishing propaganda about its engineering and public works prowess while hiding its extrinsic costs.

I agree with everything you listed, except the political quip in point (D). Most of these large projects are funded with federal dollars, and both parties have no shame in clamoring for that money. The comment you're responding to was concerning a bloated project in a blue state. The issue isn't red vs blue- it's organizational. Politicians don't see the intrinsic value of such projects so much as they see the value of money intended for such projects. Unfortunately, grifting has become such an issue that people are opposed to the undertaking of infrastructure projects, but usually their objections only extend so far as their own state lines.

(E) has been going on for hundreds of years in the US is the thing. The difference is that the cost of goods used to be where the primary grift was instead of on labor (T&M contracts historically). But now T&M contracts are not very common at least in DoD but there is still obviously some level of grift but it’s partly due to extremely terrible guidelines for government procurement processes leading to contractors that do the bare minimum getting more money than contractors that exceed expectations (one rare exception of this happening was during the reconstruction of Atlanta’s I-95 when contractors were getting massive bonuses for finishing ahead of schedule contingent upon safety inspections passing - all work completed months ahead of schedule).

Note that South Korea and France have nuclear cheaper than renewables still because their processes over decades have led to basically producing nuclear plants with horizontal scaling, driving costs down dramatically. In essence, all energy production within the borders of a country is a matter of political will moreso than even technical requirements. If a culture wants to push back on X and wins politically, it becomes more expensive and distorts intrinsic costs. If a culture pushes for Y and eventually subsidizes it, it becomes dramatically cheaper even below intrinsic costs and is over-consumed (see: fossil fuels)

One other factor I think is really interesting is what Poppendieck calls, "the tyranny of The Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

The basic notion is that the way non-experts think about the work has changed in ways that have drastically increased system inefficiency.

I know zip about construction megaprojects. But this is definitely true in software. Many executives want to pretend that projects are perfectly predictable, which a) diverts a lot of effort to non-value-creating outputs (fantasy plans, fantasy schedules), b) creates huge inefficiency by favoring fantasy plans over what's actually happening, and c) creates plenty of rework and chaos trying to solve the real-world problems when the gaps between fantasy and reality become too big to ignore.

To me, this problem is mainly rooted in executive culture, and is related to the phenomenon some call managerialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism

Solar costs stay in line because it is easy to count panels, and multiply by by the very public cost per panel. Similarly for wind, and for storage.

But few have the skills to estimate what any part of nuke should cost.

And also because the turnaround time from conception to execution is short, allowing bad practices to be identified and addressed. It also helps that solar construction at the utility scale requires lower skill labor and is more forgiving of mistakes.

One thing I would like to support in your statement is (A)The Extrinsic Costs. This was not accounted for in China and is shaping up to be a very volatile national issue for them for their Railways.

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/chinas-high-speed-rai...

https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat13/sub86/item1848.html

It is much simpler than that: fission is mature tech; its cost is not on the way down. Solar costs are still in free fall, wind almost as much so. The cheaper those get, the less competitive fission gets, just standing still.

The corruption tax on fission projects just exacerbates its structural problem.

most of that cost is politically based not technical

Fission is being built at all only for political reasons. People who build power plants on their own dime are shunning the technology. No merchant nuclear power plant selling into a competitive market has ever been built anywhere.

China will construct 150 fission reactors between now and 2035 to produce 200 gigawatts of power at a total cost of $440B.

A similar buildout in the US would take 70 years and cost well over a trillion dollars.

Do you think China is building all those reactors for political reasons as opposed to generating reliable power 24/7 for a century?

Do you think China does things without regard to politics?

They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants. For example, this keeps their nuclear sector occupied and preserves the technology against deterioration. Even if civilian NPPs are not military, the overall technology has direct connection to their military (as it does in France.)

Even with that, they are installing more renewables than nuclear. And China is pushing aggressively to reduce the cost of hydrogen. They are now exporting electrolysers at < $300/kW, a fraction of the cost from elsewhere. Cheap electrolysers are a crucial technology for pairing with intermittent renewables to get to a 100% renewable grid and remove the last tenuous argument in favor of nuclear.

I seriously doubt they will build that many reactors by 2035, btw.

China doesn't need to build 150 nuclear reactors at breakneck speed to keep their nuclear sector occupied. They're making a massive investment in this technology from the education level all the way to the construction level.

China isn't planning to realize a majority of their power supply from solar until after 2045.

Like you, I doubt they'll hit that solar goal. Instead, they'll likely build more reactors.

> They have clear political motivation to continue to build nuclear power plants.

If realizing what a terrible bet solar and wind are is political, then yes I agree their motivation is political.

Strange, then, that they are building more solar and wind than fission.

Why not build both? Nuclear is great, and pound-for-pound is a much better energy source than solar, but you can build solar much more quickly than nuclear. I don't think your rebuttal is particularly damning.

My points against solar I raised to you in another thread stand: to build the panels/batteries we need, it will create an extreme excess of carbon in the atmosphere. That's not to say we shouldn't build solar, but to pretend it can solely serve all of our collective energy needs is myopic give the constraints.

To be clear, I'm all for covering the entire planet in solar panels...after we switch our production to be powered via fission.

I.e., never.

"What a terrible bet solar and wind are", as you claim immediately above, would be a reason not to build out solar and wind, if it were correct. But it's not, and they are.

And, it is at best naive to believe that it takes more energy to produce a solar panel than it will generate. People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free. They pay open market prices for energy, which they pass directly on to customers all down the chain to the final buyer. When your panel's production output pays off its purchase cost, its output has (much more than) exceeded the energy used to produce it.

> as you claim immediately above

The claim was regarding nuclear VS solar (either/or), in which case yet, solar is a terrible bet. I stand by that.

> People mining and refining silicon, cadmium, and tellurium and making solar panels out of them do not get power for free

And you say I'm being naive...

Firstly, the price of the panels doesn't even match the price of production because of subsidies.

Secondly, they do get power for free: the well-known, terrible cost of burning fossil fuels at their current scale is not incorporated into the price of fossil fuels. Capitalist markets are not capable of doing so.

So my point is if you were to actually price fossil fuels according to their cost solar panel production would not be competitive with nuclear in any way.

> When your panel's production output pays off its purchase cost, its output has (much more than) exceeded the energy used to produce it.

Sure, it can pay off its purchase cost, but as above, that means absolutely nothing. A more interesting payment would be watts-in, watts-out, in which case I'd wager you get marginal gains. And if the watts-in are generated with fossil fuels, you're doing a lot more damage than you think.

Regarding nuclear, sure it's expensive, but a lot of that is artificial, and a lot of the high comparative cost is due to the price/cost disparity in fossil fuels. And hey, as a bonus, it works at night and on cloudy days and you don't need to build an enormous battery which is another can of worms people love to gloss over.

I see that you have completely abandoned rational argumentation and are just making shit up, so I leave this here.

Guess I struck a chord somewhere.

Struck a rock.

Fission costs would absolutely be on the way down if we continued to invest in it. Fission is a fundamental aspect of China’s energy strategy. They don’t spend 30 years building these reactors and they don’t consider it fully matured tech.

You can build a fission reactor in five years and it will reliably power a city 24 hours a day for decades and decades. That will never be true for solar.

The west has become comically inept at hard projects. Solar is easy. Just buy panels from China. Funny that China thinks fission is the future. I guess no one told them about solar.

> This has nothing to do with fissions and everything to do with degradation of contruction and practical egnineering skills - now it takes 30 years and 100 billion dollars to make a small railway in California. Victorian England or China could do this without much trouble.

Not to mention over-regulation driven by a general lack of political will. Its easier to win some votes by bashing nuclear than stand by it, even if it is the most likely alternative for baseload power in a carbon-free energy mix.

>the only proven viable storage is large scale hydro

Japan's experience with sodium-sulfur batteries stands in contrast.

https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2021/LDES/...

Na-S is less popular for new projects these days because of rapid decreases in the price of lithium batteries, but that's not a fundamental limitation of the technology — and we have no risk of running out of sodium nor sulfur.

In fairness, Japan's construction sector seems much healthier than that of the United States.