What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
&gt; According to Gurri, modern information technology enables the public, composed of amateurs, to break the power hierarchies of the industrial age.<p>This is really reflected in my area: nuclear design. This has gone from once the most secret and guarded information possible (Manhattan project) to a world where there are 50 small companies working on various types of reactor designs [1], many run by what can easily be considered amateurs.<p>Last week I was in D.C. at an industry conference and met a guy running one of these companies. He was explaining to me the merits of his design and had the basic physics unequivocally backwards. I prodded him gently on it: &quot;Oh, you mean the fast neutrons don&#x27;t get readily absorbed in fission products, not the slow ones, right?&quot; He doubled down. Some poor schmuck is funding this guy.<p>Meanwhile, Transatomic, the famed Thiel-backed molten salt company recently folded [2] partly because the two MIT grad student co-founders apparently spent more time giving TED talks about how thermal-neutron reactors could &quot;run on nuclear waste&quot; than reading the 1940s literature that established that this was not possible [3]. (To be fair to the co-founders who are wonderful and smart people, many reactor companies make big mistakes early on, most are just a lot less public about it)<p>On the other hand, a then-amateur reactor designer named Kirk Sorensen read some stuff about molten salt reactors in an old book and then almost single-handedly built up an internet army of thousands of people yelling from the rooftops the benefits of fluid-fueled reactors. Now the big institutions like national labs have caught back up and there&#x27;s serious talk and work on these reactors all over. Molten salt reactors (especially thorium-fueled ones) essentially went viral.<p>So there&#x27;s a lot of good and bad coming out of all this, and I&#x27;m not sure where it will end up. One thing from the article seems certain: we need new forms of accreditation. We should try to find ways to bring trust back to the situation given its new reality.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thirdway.org&#x2F;infographic&#x2F;the-advanced-nuclear-industry-2016-update" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thirdway.org&#x2F;infographic&#x2F;the-advanced-nuclear-in...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greentechmedia.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;read&#x2F;transatomic-to-shutter-its-nuclear-reactor-plans-make-its-technology-public" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greentechmedia.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;read&#x2F;transatomic-to-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;603731&#x2F;nuclear-energy-startup-transatomic-backtracks-on-key-promises&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;603731&#x2F;nuclear-energy-sta...</a>