Bankruptcy of Westinghouse (and probably Toshiba)

There's a handful of companies that are in the nuclear power plant construction business. GE, for example, and Westinghouse. Westinghouse went bankrupt (2017) trying to build the last two new nuclear reactors at old plants in the US (Georgia and South Carolina). The South Carolina plant was cancelled. The story is pretty interesting. Here's just one article. Toshiba is the parent company of Westinghouse and it's probably toast too, or will be significantly restructured to try to shuffle the debt around.

I worked at a company that made some satellite hardware back in the early 1990s. I was a entry level employee (physics dude) and did some hands on work assembling and testing some of the components. Absolutely everything was documented. If I turned a screw, documented it. If I ran a test it was documented, which included a signature. At the end of that project, the company had a room full of three ring binders filled with paper. There was a manager who just kept track of the documentation. I assume nuclear power plant construction is similar. It must generate a ton of paperwork; although now I assume a lot of it is computer files.

Anyway, building a nuclear power plant is super expensive, but nobody wants to pay for anything. Contractors try to cut corners, inevitably, but then it fails and they need to rework things. There's no way to bring in cheap foreign labor, or make things overseas.

Americans don't want to pay other Americans to make anything. It's the same story in France and other western countries. If a company has to pay westerners western wages it means the management and shareholders can't get rich. That same story happened in ancient Greece and Rome, too.

The pipe dream of using robots and AI to do big projects like nuke plant construction is based on that. Nobody wants to pay. Nobody wants to be the dummy stuck doing the work, either.