Here’s an interesting, short paper on the economics of small-scale nuclear reactors. A telling snippet:

The study team pursued this issue further to assess how the risk of a large investment relative to the size of the company would affect the business case for a power plant. Figure 3 depicts a rough estimate of the relationship between the weighted average cost of capital that a company would be expected to bear as a function of project size to compensate for the risks that a large investment could pose to the company as a whole. This model helps to explain why power producers would be interested in SMRs even if other nuclear plants could be built at a lower per-kilowatt cost

Either countries and companies that are pouring money into SMR, e.g. Samsung, are run by fools or they think there must be some practical utility in them.

The caption of this post at Science 2.0, “Conservatives’ Understanding Of Climate Science Is More In Line With Climate Scientists Than Liberals'”, by Hank Campbell seems calculated to make progressives’ heads explode. When you dig into it, however, it’s a lot more commonsensical than that, quotidian in fact:

An interesting survey in Oregon highlighted this issue; the short version of what they found is that conservatives – well, conservative for Oregon(2) – are more skeptical of climate change but when unpacked their views on the science are right in line with…climate scientists.

This is counter-intuitive, right? Not really. The more you know, the more likely you are to see the bigger picture – and flaws.(3) The more you instead believe, the more likely you are to abdicate your thinking to experts. You will take scientists on faith like religious people do priests. One of the authors grew up in a culture that didn’t believe in evolution or climate change, so they are sympathetic to the idea that there are often values issues involved. Coastal liberals aren’t going to share the values of the rural midwest, so condescension about evolution when they don’t know any more about adaptive radiation than religious farmers and just have faith in science rather than a Bible is not superior thinking.

More liberals see climate science and climate change as, in the words of the authors, “certain and simple.” It is not complex (“bro, do you even science?”), models of today will never need to be reconsidered in the future, and they trust climate scientists absolutely. This is a sharp turn from other areas, where liberals have beatified “lived experience” to such an extent that often no data matters and people can claim expertise despite having none.

See? Conservatives in Oregon. What is a conservative in Oregon? I doubt it’s the same as a conservative in, say, Alabama or even Indiana. I would phrase it a bit differently: it’s darned hard to be radical and nuanced and pragmatic at the same time. Seeing the complexities is almost inherently moderate in nature. I may touch on this again in more depth in a later post.

The Associated Press reports major demonstrations against a renewal of lockdowns in Australia:

SYDNEY (AP) — Thousands of people took to the streets of Sydney and other Australian cities on Saturday to protest lockdown restrictions amid another surge in cases, and police made several arrests after crowds broke through barriers and threw plastic bottles and plants.

The unmasked participants marched from Sydney’s Victoria Park to Town Hall in the central business district, carrying signs calling for “freedom” and “the truth.”

There was a heavy police presence in Sydney, including mounted police and riot officers in response to what authorities said was unauthorized protest activity. Police confirmed a number of arrests had been made after objects were thrown at officers.

New South Wales Police said it recognized and supported the rights of free speech and peaceful assembly, but the protest was a breach of public health orders.

Like those here the Australian authorities blame the protests on Rupert Murdoch but I suspect it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Consider this. You’ve prevented a major outbreak of COVID-19 through stringent lockdowns. Now what? At risk of stating the obvious new cases of COVID-19 will be most common where the fewest people have been vaccinated against the disease. The vaccination rate in both Australia and New Zealand is below 20% of the population compared with 50% here. The price of success of the lockdowns in preventing spread of the disease? Pretty obviously they’re getting pushback on reinstating the lockdowns and vaccination hasn’t been that big a priority for them.

At LiveScience Ben Turner reports that the Chinese are preparing to deploy a test molten salt reactor:

The molten-salt nuclear reactor, which runs on liquid thorium rather than uranium, is expected to be safer than traditional reactors because the molten salt cools and solidifies quickly when exposed to the air, insulating the thorium, so that any potential leak would spill much less radiation into the surrounding environment compared with leaks from traditional reactors.

The prototype reactor is expected to be completed next month, with the first tests beginning as early as September. This will pave the way for the building of the first commercial reactor, slated for construction by 2030.

Here’s a good quote:

“Small-scale reactors have significant advantages in terms of efficiency, flexibility and economy,” Yan Rui, a physics professor at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, and colleagues wrote in a paper about the project published July 15 in the journal Nuclear Techniques. “They can play a key role in the future transition to clean energy. It is expected that small-scale reactors will be widely deployed in the next few years.”

The article is a bit misleading, however. Molten salt reactors have been around since the 1960s. They’re not new. One that’s used commercially would be new, however, and there are several U. S. companies just about as far along as the Chinese effort is characterized to be.

The main impediments here are government regulation, litigation, and priorities. We can litigate, regulate, and bicker ourselves to death.

I have a considerable amount for sympathy with the observations Sergio Galeano makes at The Hill:

An increase in skills is not the only thing that workers need. As shifts in labor demand have hurt the most vulnerable workers, there’s been a stronger spotlight on the mentorship, coaching and wraparound support services that are increasingly being recognized as part of a holistic approach to workforce and human capital development.

This support is critical, as women, minorities, less-educated and low income-workers, young people, and immigrants may all need to cope with making more occupational transitions than their peers as the pandemic winds down.

Many employers have responded to this reshuffling of the labor market by offering greater flexibility and nontraditional incentives. Despite this trend, however, benefits may not expand for all, increasing the risk of a second-class workforce.

There’s a role for government in all of these shifts. One way the government can start is greater federal investment in workforce training. Fortunately, there’s a conversation starting in Washington about the federal programs related to workforce development and training.

One of the major changes in the American economy over the last half century or so is that an increasing amount of the expense of training the workforce has been handed off to the workers. Years ago employee training programs and career paths that moved the employee from having, essentially, no experience to being a senior whatever. Those have vanished or, more precisely, they have become a business. Employers hire to suit—everyone from juniors to seniors in practically every field.

I think that Mr. Galeano is overestimating the ability of government to be an effective participant in this process. Government training programs are inevitably retrospective in nature—rather than training people for the jobs of the future or even the present they train them for the jobs of the past or jobs that will never materialize.

I don’t have a completely palatable solution for these problems. My proposal has long been to tighten the job market by limiting the number of workers brought in (legally or illegally) from abroad and restricting the ability of companies to offshore their workforces but otherwise let the market deal with the problem. That, too, has problems.

The quote of the day comes from Rob Smith at RealClearMarkets stated as “Rob’s Rule”:

The more celebrated the expert, the more likely he is to be a self-aggrandizing, bloviating fool.

His target is economics and, while I agree with some of his observations, I disagree with others. I agree with his observation that economics is a behavioral science wholeheartedly. I would add that I believe the move towards econometrics that really began to gain steam about 50 years ago was a misstep. Most of what we know about economics was already known about 200 years ago and for good reason.

Economics is not a predictive science like physics; it’s a descriptive one like anthropology much as economists hate it when I say that. No economist can tell you what the stock price for XXX Corp. will be two weeks from today or what the full range of secondary effects for any given government policy will be. They can be useful in providing the broad contours, though. There’s no real money in broad contours.

I found this piece at U. S. Naval Naval Institute by Captains Scot Miller and Charles Deleot and Manfred Koethe thought-provoking. I think they’re looking at the right problem—bad software:

According to the Consortium for Information and Software Quality (CISQ), in 2020 the United States wasted $2.08 trillion on bad software and its effects—nearly 10 percent of U.S. gross domestic product! The naval services’ estimated budget for fiscal year 2021 is about $207 billion, suggesting the Sea Services may lose $20 billion in 2021 to the effects of bad software. If the Navy was wasting $20 billion per year in fuel, then command dismissals, inspector general investigations, and Congressional inquiries would follow.

If read their analysis correctly, they point the finger at the following culprits:

• Agile development
• Software developers’ guilds

and propose a dedication to Model-Based Systems Engineering as a solution. I think they’re pointing in the wrong direction and, should their proposal be adopted, it will ultimately prove disappointing.

The authors quote one old wisecrack (“garbage in; garbage out”). Let me quote two more:

• A camel is a horse designed by a committee
• An elephant is a mouse built to military specification

“Agile development” can be summarized as the ability to respond to changes in requirements. I have seen good agile developments and bad ones. The difference is generally due to the “product owner”—the individual responsible for determining the scope of the development. Scope creep is impossible when the requirements and specifications of a development are rigidly enforced and that’s true regardless of the development methodology. Scope creep is all too easy when the needs are poorly defined and the product owner has deep pockets. Military projects, whether building a jet fighter or invading Afghanistan, are all too subject to scope creep. If you try to tell me otherwise, I’ll have some of what you’re having.

The authors provide no examples of these “guilds”. There’s a good reason: they don’t exist. There have been attempts at creating such things many times over the last 70 years but they’ve all failed. If they had succeeded there would be no such thing as offshoring software development or staffing companies like Tata.

What do exist are corporations with proprietary products. That has been true since computers were invented and it will inevitably frustrate the authors’ vision. As soon as the MBSE generators they imagine have been developed, those corporations will all change their products to elude them. That, too, is the history of computers.

Software development tools are already evolving to solve the problem the authors identify in a different way. The latest approach is called “low-code/no code”. See also “digital transformation”. While effective those tools are proprietary, too. Their promise is to bring software development closer to the end users and reduce its costs. That has been tried under different guises a dozen different times over the years. The latest strategy will founder for the same reason past approaches have: not everybody wants to be a programmer or has the required mental equipment.

As I read this piece by Theresa Hitchens at Breaking Defense, describing the potential of directed-energy weapons:

Current DE systems under development for countering unmanned aerial systems (c-UAS) have ranges “nearing 1 kilometer,” AFRL’s study explains, as opposed to other types of counter-UAS capabilities — such as net guns and shotguns — which are only effective at “10s of meters ranges.”

and

“By 2060 we can predict that DE systems will become more effective, and this idea of a force field includes methods to destroy other threats too,” he said. “Eventually there may be potential to achieve the penultimate goal of a Nuclear or ballistic missile umbrella. It’s fun to think about what that might be in 2060, but we don’t want to speculate too much.”

I could only think “How much energy would a weapons system capable of defending a military base require?” You can’t do that with solar power. I can only speculate that it would require nuclear fission or fusion or some method of producing power that hasn’t been invented yet.

I have been saying for some time that one of the best things about Illinois is the object lesson it provides for other states. This Wall Street Journal editorial provides another example of that:

Unemployment was lowest in Nebraska (2.5%), Utah (2.7%), South Dakota (2.9%), New Hampshire (2.9%), Idaho (3%), Vermont (3.1%), Alabama (3.3%), Montana (3.7%) and Oklahoma (3.7%). All are governed by Republicans, except Vermont, which has a GOP Governor and Democratic Legislature.

By contrast, the states with the highest unemployment are all run by Democrats: Connecticut (7.9%), New Mexico (7.9%), Nevada (7.8%), California (7.7%), Hawaii (7.7%), New York (7.7%), New Jersey (7.3%) and Illinois (7.2%). Mere coincidence?

Hawaii and Nevada rely on tourism, which will take time to fully bounce back. But what’s Illinois’s excuse? Other Midwest states with a mix of agriculture and manufacturing have unemployment rates near what they were at the end of President Obama’s second term. That includes Wisconsin (3.9%), Indiana (4.1%), Missouri (4.3%) and Kentucky (4.4%).

Or what about California, the nation’s richest state? While California makes up 12% of the U.S. population, it accounted for only about 9% of employment growth last month. Florida and Arizona lifted most of their business restrictions long ago, yet they still added jobs at two to three times the rate of California.

and

California’s labor force has declined 2.8%, or about 540,000 workers, since February 2020. Illinois (2.7%), New Jersey (3.5%) and Connecticut (7.6%) have also lost a significant number of workers. New York’s labor force has fallen by somewhat less (0.9%), though still more than Florida’s (0.7%), Georgia’s (0.7%) and Texas’s (0.8%).

So what’s going on? For one, high-tax Democratic states have continued to lose population to lower-tax states during the pandemic. This likely has contributed to their shrinking workforces and reduced local business demand. The flight of high-earners and office workers has slammed New York City’s restaurant industry.

Let’s look at some various factors:

I picked those states because I think that it’s more useful to compare similar things when trying to identify differences. Why compare Hawaii with North Dakota? There are too many confounding factors. I picked those factors because I thought they might be interesting when comparing and contrasting outcomes.

I’m not as convinced as the editors of the WSJ that it’s the political party that makes the difference or, said another way, I think the causality may run in a different direction than the editors think. The state with the highest unemployment rate is, of course, Illinois which does, indeed, have a Democratic governor. The state with the lowest unemployment rate is Wisconsin which also has a Democratic governor. To my eye it looks as though states with large minority populations tend to elect Democrats and also have high unemployment rates.