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Nobody Builds Reactors For Fun Anymore
stox tips an article from Nobel Week Dialogue about the biggest problem of the nuclear power industry: it's not fun anymore. The author, Ashutosh Jogalekar, expands upon this quote from Freeman Dyson: "The fundamental problem of the nuclear industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation, real though all these problems are. The fundamental problem of the industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors. Sometime between 1960 and 1970 the fun went out of the business. The adventurers, the experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control. The accountants and managers decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors." Jogalekar adds, "For any technological development to be possible, the technology needs to drive itself with the fuel of Darwinian innovation. It needs to generate all possible ideas – including the weird ones – and then fish out the best while ruthlessly weeding out the worst. ... Nothing like this happened with nuclear power. It was a technology whose development was dictated by a few prominent government and military officials and large organizations and straitjacketed within narrow constraints. ... The result was that the field remained both scientifically narrow and expensive. Even today there are only a handful of companies building and operating most of the world's reactors. To reinvigorate the promise of nuclear power to provide cheap energy to the world and combat climate change, the field needs to be infused with the same entrepreneurial spirit that pervaded the TRIGA design team and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs."
Nobody *does science* for fun anymore.
I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, but the fact is that because as a species we've been systematically looking into the unknowns for a few hundred years now, there's not very much low-hanging fruit left. You do certainly hear stories about some teenager discovering something really cool, and that's great and should be encouraged and celebrated. But the fact of the matter is that most scientists (let alone the average public) won't do much more than add a tiny bit of knowledge to some very specific field. We're past the days where you could invent powered, controlled flight in a garage, in the same way the Wright brothers were past the days where you could invent calculus, and so on. Science is like a tree, and if you're lucky you might discover the next level in the tree - but the nodes are smaller.
And that's great! The reason it's so hard to discover new things is because we know so much now, and the stuff we know we don't know requires building huge rings under Europe, or launching satellites, or building telescopes that cover entire deserts or something. Basically, we're advancing as a species. But yeah, the size of discoveries nowadays do tend to be proportional to resources.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
More innovation - yes. But please not the hacker spirit of Silicon Valley.
You see, if your website is full of holes, that's bad for your company. But if your nuclear reactor is full of holes, that's bad for everyone.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
-- Lord Kelvin, 1900
Unless the moderator is damaged and bits of it fall into the tank, or worse still block the plug hole.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC