I had a similar reaction, and I actually think the nuclear example is a clear sign that we are in a design overhang for nuclear reactors. We’ve developed multiple generations of better nuclear technologies and mostly just not used them. As a result, the workforce and mining and manufacturing capabilities that would have existed without the regulatory pause have not happened, and so even if regulations were relaxed I would not expect to catch up all the way to where we would have counterfactually been. But if we suddenly started holding nuclear to only the same level of overall safety standards as we hold other power generation, we would get slow growth as we rebuild a whole industry from scratch, then faster growth once it becomes possible to do so. (Or not, if timelines make solar+storage cheap faster than nuclear can ramp up, but that’s a whole different question). And no, it wouldn’t be 10^6 times cheaper, there’s a floor due to just cost of materials that’s much higher than that. But I would expect some catch-up growth.
The examples are things that look sort of like overhang, but are different in important ways. I did not include the hundreds of graphs I looked through that look nothing like overhang.
I’m pretty confused by your post. All your examples seem like good examples of overhangs but you come to the opposite conclusion.
I had a similar reaction, and I actually think the nuclear example is a clear sign that we are in a design overhang for nuclear reactors. We’ve developed multiple generations of better nuclear technologies and mostly just not used them. As a result, the workforce and mining and manufacturing capabilities that would have existed without the regulatory pause have not happened, and so even if regulations were relaxed I would not expect to catch up all the way to where we would have counterfactually been. But if we suddenly started holding nuclear to only the same level of overall safety standards as we hold other power generation, we would get slow growth as we rebuild a whole industry from scratch, then faster growth once it becomes possible to do so. (Or not, if timelines make solar+storage cheap faster than nuclear can ramp up, but that’s a whole different question). And no, it wouldn’t be 10^6 times cheaper, there’s a floor due to just cost of materials that’s much higher than that. But I would expect some catch-up growth.
The examples are things that look sort of like overhang, but are different in important ways. I did not include the hundreds of graphs I looked through that look nothing like overhang.