It all starts and ends with the executive management team. To say that the executive team is out-of-touch with the rank and file is a massive understatement. The leadership team have consistently mismanaged resources and now they've run out of money. For a long time there was no contract management or vendor management to speak of, leading to huge costs and delays. Until the last couple years the CEO was skeptical that Project Management was even a profession, so engineers were forced to be their own project managers, with predictable consequences. A healthy skepticism on the part of the CEO about the inertia of the nuclear industry warped over time into a pathological distrust of experience in general. When experienced people made it through the hiring process and questioned the base engineering or scientific assumptions undergirding the project, they didn't last long at the company. They weren't "a good culture fit."
The upshot of all this mismanagement and lack of experience was that a first of its kind, cutting-edge medical isotopes plant was mostly designed by inexperienced junior engineers without experienced oversight or mentorship. They designed without sufficient resources and working to an unrealistic timeline sold to investors. Once construction started, the work was barely keeping ahead of final design. No one should have been surprised when the project became hopelessly behind schedule and over budget. As things spiraled out of control, panic set in and the blame game started. It was the pandemic, it was work from home, the staff are lazy; everything was wrong as long as it didn't hold a mirror to the executive team's own behavior. Expensive executive management consultants came through, but nothing changed. The board should have replaced the CEO years ago, once it became clear that the project was failing. Instead, senior leadership became paranoid and shifted blame to the workers instead of reckoning with their own failures. The culture quickly became toxic and paranoid. What had been an admirably flexible work culture evaporated as the executives started equating productivity with the amount of time people sat at their desk in the office.
When the layoffs finally came in August 2023, none of the people actually responsible for the failures was let go. No consequences for them, but a lot of good people who believed in the project lost their jobs. The moly plant project is basically mothballed. Several hundred million dollars worth of building is collecting dust because they don't have the resources to redesign all the components that didn't work. Instead, the company is trying to convert their Therapeutics R&D process into a commercial product on a timeline that is, wait for it, hopelessly optimistic in a bid to bring the company to solvency. Add in a "Phase 3" project for which there is no actual business case and you come to the sobering realization that the company's much-touted "sustainable path to fusion" is a stillborn joke. Frankly, if you need to deceive investors with an overly rosy budget and timeline in order to obtain funding, was there ever really a business case in the first place?
