I’m not sure nuclear power is fundamentally different in France or South Korea or China. Nuclear plant are heavily regulated centrally planned things everywhere, and for good reasons—nuclear is quite safe if done correctly but has the potential to go immensely wrong. The only example I know well is France, which is one of the very few countries that relies massively on nuclear power and it is thanks to massive government planning and funding from the 60′s onward.
And I want to point something up : we have nuclear power plant thanks to heavily centralised government funded research. Same thing for the computer (Turing), satellite telecommunications, and basically everything (DNA, relativity, quantum mechanic, computers, radioactivity are fields were a huge chunk of the applications (and most of the ground work in fundamental research) have come from public spending and planning. CRISPR-Cas9 is a recent example too. Oh yeah, and AIDS discovery. And Space X by the way also benefits from disguised NASA funding.
Now it could also be argued that the academic world is in itself a kind of free market for ideas—the currency being citations and reputation rather than hard dollars… and in this view public spending in research is useful but government planning less so.
Same thing for the computer (Turing), satellite telecommunications, and basically everything (DNA, relativity, quantum mechanic, computers, radioactivity are fields were a huge chunk of the applications (and most of the ground work in fundamental research) have come from public spending and planning
It’s worth distinguishing public spending in general with heavily centralized public spending.
Thomas Kuhn wrote about how productive scientific fields are driven by the researchers in those fields tackling the problems they consider to be tractable and moving the field forward. In many cases those researchers are paid by public spending.
Centralized big public spending projects however need political buy in and require the researchers to justify their research projects by the needs of the political agenda that funds their projects.
Government planning seems to be useful when it comes for scaling up a technology. At the start of the human genome project it was easy to state the goal of sequencing the genome and the requirement to build better sequencing technology to achieve that goal.
Nuclear power plants are both less regulated in South Korea and for a long time the regulations were less followed due to corruption. Now it seems that the South Koreans cracked down on that corruption and want to exit nuclear power as well.
France seems to have rising cost for nuclear energy due to heavier regulation as well but still does it cheaper. Part of the reason seems to be less public inquiries (a form of regulation).
I’m not sure nuclear power is fundamentally different in France or South Korea or China. Nuclear plant are heavily regulated centrally planned things everywhere, and for good reasons—nuclear is quite safe if done correctly but has the potential to go immensely wrong. The only example I know well is France, which is one of the very few countries that relies massively on nuclear power and it is thanks to massive government planning and funding from the 60′s onward.
And I want to point something up : we have nuclear power plant thanks to heavily centralised government funded research. Same thing for the computer (Turing), satellite telecommunications, and basically everything (DNA, relativity, quantum mechanic, computers, radioactivity are fields were a huge chunk of the applications (and most of the ground work in fundamental research) have come from public spending and planning. CRISPR-Cas9 is a recent example too. Oh yeah, and AIDS discovery. And Space X by the way also benefits from disguised NASA funding.
Now it could also be argued that the academic world is in itself a kind of free market for ideas—the currency being citations and reputation rather than hard dollars… and in this view public spending in research is useful but government planning less so.
It’s worth distinguishing public spending in general with heavily centralized public spending.
Thomas Kuhn wrote about how productive scientific fields are driven by the researchers in those fields tackling the problems they consider to be tractable and moving the field forward. In many cases those researchers are paid by public spending.
Centralized big public spending projects however need political buy in and require the researchers to justify their research projects by the needs of the political agenda that funds their projects.
Government planning seems to be useful when it comes for scaling up a technology. At the start of the human genome project it was easy to state the goal of sequencing the genome and the requirement to build better sequencing technology to achieve that goal.
Nuclear power plants are both less regulated in South Korea and for a long time the regulations were less followed due to corruption. Now it seems that the South Koreans cracked down on that corruption and want to exit nuclear power as well.
France seems to have rising cost for nuclear energy due to heavier regulation as well but still does it cheaper. Part of the reason seems to be less public inquiries (a form of regulation).