No Doing, No Learning
A regulation that raises gasoline prices makes people angry but when regulation prevents an industry from ever existing, most people never learn what they lost.
Consider nuclear power. Overnight construction costs for early U.S. demonstration reactors fell 81 percent between 1954 and 1968. For reactors begun between 1967 and 1972, costs rose 187 percent. The 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision and then the reaction to Three Mile Island in 1979 accelerated the cost increases and slowed construction even more. Note the order. The turn was underway years before the accident that everyone blames for it.
What might have happened had the earlier learning and deployment trends continued? Peter Lang’s 2017 paper in Energiesestimates that nuclear power would have cost about one-tenth as much by 2015. The additional generation could have avoided as many as 9.5 million premature deaths.
The number is staggering even if quartered. Millions of deaths. Yet, the graveyard was both invisible and silent.
(Furthermore, climate change would not be a problem today had nuclear power not been handicapped.)
The nuclear story you probably know but Niko McCarty has an excellent new Works in Progress piece on an invisible graveyard of technology that I knew almost nothing about.
In the 1980s, officials decided to regulate engineered microbes under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a law written for industrial chemicals. Microbes swap genes all the time, but EPA treats them as “new” whenever DNA is introduced from another genus. As a result, even a marker gene used simply to identify successfully edited cells can trigger review if it remains in the organism. McCarty reports that researchers filed more than 240 applications between 1987 and 2018: “Only a few were ever approved for widespread use.”
What have we lost? We can’t know for sure but among the plausible losses McCarty discusses are engineered bacteria that detect buried explosives, microbes that extract rare-earth metals and improved plastic-digesting enzymes. Similarly, Chernia et al.write:
