The Doomsday Clock is a judgement call on the likelihood of a global catastrophe. These days use of nuclear weapons would trigger a global catastrophe, but that hasn't always been the case.
Back when the global nuclear arsenal was a lot smaller, was delivered by aircraft instead of ballistic missiles, and the negative effects of nuclear war weren't well understood, nuclear weapons were still on the table for regular use in warfare.
If a war had broken out between the US and the Soviet Union in say, 1950, nuclear weapons would almost certainly have been used. Mutually assured destruction wasn't a thing then, and many people believed a war between the US and USSR was inevitable. And it would have been bad - but not nearly as bad as that same war if it had happened in 1980.
Plus there's the Cuban Missle Crisis. That was a wake-up call. Measures were taken afterward to ease back on the itchy trigger fingers after that.
They can call it whatever they want but PWR is an old design. They polished the design a bit, so what? It's still an overblown pressure cooker.
Industrial scale reactor designs take a ton of time and money and experience to research. Research reactors are only a step in the middle of the process, and nobody's been willing to take any new designs past that.
SMEs have potential not because they're particularly efficient or cost effective, but because stand a chance of pushing the state of the art. They offer a way around the whole "I'm not paying $40bn for an unproven design" problem.
1960s nuclear has been powering the world for decades. Even most new plants are using reactor designs from over half a century ago.
New reactor designs exist and some have even been tested on the small scale, but nuclear power is an extremely conservative industry. That molten salt reactor built in China not that long ago that made all the news as a "new" reactor type? The US first tested that design in the 1960s, and the no further research was funded by anyone despite the fact that the prototype worked very well.
The current hope is that Small Modular Reactors catch on and drag the rest of the nuclear industry with them. They tend to use newer and potentially much safer designs.
How is that hard to believe? I was already an adult when the Internet became open to the public. My basic speech patterns were pretty well set by then.
English is one of the most spoken languages on the planet. How is it you expect everyone to sound the same?
In your scenario? WFH. I like my work and hate traffic.
If I lived five minutes away from the office like I used to? I'd go in, assuming they'd let me be flexible with my time. I like being in the office. My coworkers are great and if I get burned out on what I'm doing I can go play with the hardware in the lab.
In real life? I live 100 miles from the office and work from home. I miss the comradery and being able to just walk down the hall and kick a piece of malfunctioning equipment directly though.
I work with government people all the time, and I think it's highly dependant on what the project is and what part of the government is running it.
We've worked with the Navy and, well, their "experts" for the work we do are a joke. My company designed the system they use and all the experts that work on it work for my company.
We've worked with the Army Corps of Engineers and it's completely different. The people we worked with were knowledgeable and thorough in their work. They specify exactly what work is required and will make sure it's done right.
State/local governments are also hit-or-miss. Often they don't have experts at all and it's up to us to work with them to determine what they need and how to implement it. But sometimes there's the old graybeard who knows the system in and out and can fix anything. I like dealing with those guys. They're usually full of character and you can learn useful things from them.
We see this all the time as an integrator. The project I mostly work on is so off the wall that there are maybe four people who are experts on it. The fire and security system we were asked to build for a school system is so custom that nobody is an expert; I'm the only guy that knows how the backend works (because I wrote most of it from scratch in a mix a C, TSQL, and Wonderware QuckScript), but I'm clueless on the front end.
I walk into places running old end-of-life Modicons running LL984 ladder logic and don't know a single person outside Schneider-Electric that understands that stuff besides me. I'm not an expert, but I'm all that's available.
Our business development team is always asking us, "do we have people who know xxx?" and I have to tell them no, if you want to bid on that job you need to hire an xxx expert to do the design and lead the project. Occasionally we do.
There's a trend of companies requiring workers to show up at the office for two or three days a week. It's a real thing; my office requires three days for people that live in the area. Several friends of mine are seeing similar policies at their offices.
Some people just aren't productive at home. That's why our office set the new policy. We didn't want to lose good talent. Fortunately for me I live 100 miles away and work fine from home.
The ads for remote work are generally trying to hire experts that would otherwise be unwilling to move.
It gets pretty lonely out at sea...