Malthusian Killjoys
... and the people sticking it to them
Nuclear technology was born during WW2 surrounded by secrecy, strict bureaucracies and large companies. Elder buraucrats made decisions with military pragmatism in mind.
Then, for a brief, enthusiastic period of time after WW2, nuclear power was seen as the humanity’s great liberator from scarcity.
Without scarcity, there is less reason to go to war.
And so the USA “open-sourced” their Shippingport PWR design to the world.
In a productive frenzy, people developed all sorts of strange reactors,
sodium-cooled, graphite-moderated, aqueous homogeneous reactors or molten plutonium fueled.
But then, it stopped.
Development almost froze in time. In one analysis of this, a prominent protagonists came to the following conlcusion:
"The fundamental problem of the nuclear industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation, real though all these problems are. The fundamental problem of the industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors....Sometime between 1960 and 1970 the fun went out of the business. The adventurers, the experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control. […] Nobody builds reactors for fun anymore. The spirit of the little red schoolhouse is dead. That, in my opinion, is what went wrong with nuclear power.”
- Freeman Dyson, cited here.
Edward Teller, the guy that built the most devestating weapon known to us, the hydrogen bomb, worked with Dyson to build a reactor that was so safe, that a bunch of bright High School students can operate it safely: the TRIGA reactor, which was deployed 66 times in 24 countries. It can be operated at thermal power levels from <0.1 to 16 MW. Its unique fuel form allows this reactor to be pulsed to power levels more than 1000x that: to 22,000 MW. A really weired, yet useful reactor.
The Darwinian experimentation weeding out thousands of bad ideas to cultivate a few good ones, stopped take place in the fission sector.
This is probably due to a complicated mix of public paranoia against all things nuclear, well-funded activists, a lack of economies of scale, and zealous regulators, which prevents entrepreneus to experiment with ideas.
Only a handful of companies are building an operating nuclear reactos across the world, most of them state-affiliated behemoths.
Because of this, innovators cannot reduce the price, and because entrpreneurs are not going to deploy an inherently expensive technology, we are kind of stuck.
The Killjoys’ Holy War
My personal interpretation is that there was a cultural shift that put Malthusian ideas back into the spot light.
In this view, progress was just increasing the number of people that were going to inevitably starve. Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” is probably the most famous expression of that line of thought that tries to manage the starvation of millions due to “logical”, “mathematical” “necessity”, derived from modelling human populations as mindless fungus in a jar.
When mastery over nature has become a bad in itself, enabling the cancerous, unregulated poplulation growth and subsequent collapse, it is not a far leap to start to condemn energy itself as evil.
Instead, Amory Lovins argued, we should look to “energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.”
Discovering “a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy” would be disastrous, “because of what we would do with it.”
Paul Erlich famously compared giving society cheap abundant energy to giving a child a machine gun.
If you belief that cheap and abudant energy is evil, why not regualte it out of existence? Instead of promoting physical and technological engineering to build technologies that could free humanity from so many constraints put upon by the accidents of history, the killjoys’ religious creed about the undesirability of humans demand social engineering, conventiently concentrating all power in their hands to enforce an “equitable” distribution of ecological resources according to their superior intellect, wisdom and taste.
There cannot be any “permissionless innovation”. Everything has to be weighed and signed off on. Only what satisfies their particular creed can be allowed to go forward lest to increase human influence on or worst of all mastery over nature.
Once you have identified an evil, all trade offs are false. Nuclear power was identified as that evil, because it really has the potential to overcome scarcity.
But that cannot be allowed, so it’s safety must be absolute and there mustn’t be any waste.
This spirit has permeated and in fact dominated the culture in the West for decades and only the eventual energy crisis seems to be powerful enough to snap politicians out of it.
When they do, they scramble to restart the industrial base to build PWRs. Unfortunately, these industries atrophy during the long slumber periods, making countries pay essentially FOAK costs, over and over again.
Overregulated, slow, highly politicized and emotionally charged: the killjoys won that battle of their war against liberating humanity from energy constraints1 by making innovative people run from the industry.
The same fate befell “the other kind” of nuclear power: fusion.
After an almost Olympian competition to get to a break-even fusion reactor between the US, Europe, Soviet Union and Japan, in which the power produced in experiments grew a trillionfold between 1970 and 1997, bureaucrats and science managers put on the breaks. Instead of keeping the competition going, they essentially cartelized all of the research by funneling all of the funds into an international project. They created, ITER, a large, low-risk, conservative science approach.
It took nearly a quarter of a century to even decide where to put it, and it will take even more than that to reach ignition, which was scheduled for 2035, but will probably not be reached in time.
It might have been a great management decision, but it sucked the fun out of it.
But then something strange happened. Entrepreneurs entered the field.
And the fun returned.
Philanthropic Entrepreneurs?
Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, George Soros, Marc Benioff are among the billionairs that invest in fusion companies.
In the theory of capitalism, the market is the place where demand and supply meet. Unbelievable many, complex and distributed interactions all across the globle collapses into a single numner: the price.
Because there are obvious problems wiht the "pure" from of markets, for example when people with little or no income cannot produce “demand”, societies implemented fixes.2 But let’s assume here that money earned is a noisy proxy for (social) value produced.
If that is true, (idealized) capitalists are the most outwardly focused and a lot of “stupid” decision from the perspective of “techy” people by the owner/management might actually be motivated by “raising” revenue, which, in this model, is equivalent to producing more social value.
Of course, (market) capitalists are seen as the most selfish people by idological adversaries, because they “care only about money”.
It’s either “fair” that they earn their salaries, because they ensure that the maximum social value is created, or they are thieves.3
(Idealized) Scientists are on the other side of this spectrum: they research what sparks their interests and drives them forward. They venture into the unknown, because it is fun.
You could either call them the most selfish people there are, because they follow only their own interest, or you could think of them as the most charitable and socially beneficial people, donating their life to question of possibly immense impact.
Engineers are in the business of translating theoretical knowledge of the scientists into consumable and usable products to offer to people (either via a market, or via some other form of distribution “according to their need”).
Regardless of your personal economic priors, engineers are somewhere in between the extremes. Their concern for “real world” problems robs them of a lot of the romanticism of the scientists, and blunts the edge of the crititicism against "caring only for money”. Anyway, they are at the interface of the “pure” research realm and the “mundane” business world.
Fusion companies are led by tech entrepreneurs, which are business people with a positive view on technology, risking their own money - for something.
A breakthrough in fusion would be worth unimaginable sums of money: it could replace, oil, gas and coal for energy generation, which are worth trillions per year. It could also help to mitigate climate change, which is worth enormous amounts of money, too.
But it also enables billions of people to lead (energy) richer lives, prevents emission-related deaths and enables general economic growth; especially in the poor areas of the world. It has enormous social benefits.
So pick your favorite story for why they are financing these companies, but no matter your particular narrative, that fact remains that they are bringing scientists to work on the most extreme states of matter, never before seen temperature differentials, the world’s most powerful lasers and magnets, and custom-made materials able to withstand plasma erosion and neutron damage. They are also bringing the engineers who are translating theory into actual systems that work, while their business acumen drives the enterprises towards potentially marketable increments.
Private Fusion
There are now more than 30 companies, working on fusion via mutliple pathways: inertial confinement, magnetic confinement, magnetized liner inertial, inertial electrostatic confinement, and magnetized target fusion; they are playing with superconducting magnets, lasers, gigantic guns, pistons and capacitators, tokamaks, stellerators, reversed field configurations, liquid metal blankets, partical accelerators, plasma guns, magnetic mirrors and different fuels.4
Some companies, like Avalance Energy are trying to capitalize on the fact that there is no theoretical lower size limit on a fusion device. Their designs could comfortably fit on your desk. Just listen to how much different that is from working in a highly regulated environment:
"We are applying a test-fail-fix approach, akin to rocket engine development, to small scale fusion and it's incredibly exciting to see our hardware ideas go from design to test in a matter of days."
- Robin Langtry, cited here
It’s almost certain that (almost?) all of them will fail. But they are pushing the envelope of the possible forward. These companies are competing and collaborating with each other. The regulators in the US and UK have opted to leave them mostly alone, which means that they will have a higher iteration rate from design to design and lower costs (relative to fission!) to build the prototypes.
Let’s not kid ourselves: there are ginormous challanges; plasma stability, tritium breeding and handling, heat transfer, hard neutron radiation, repitition rate, supply chains and so on. There shouldn’t be any way how these scrapily founded companies, leeching off of research done in National Labs like 40 years ago should have a leg up compared to ITER, a mulit-national, gigantic project which will cost about 5 times more than all of these private companies have as funding.
But they are working in a pure capitalism, fun way. There is little more powerful then highly intelligent people tinkering around with an inspiring goal and a direct transmission line from pure research to market oriented application.
Fusion is having all the fun, fission is having all the regulation.
Fusion is definitely still the underdog compared to fission.
We know that fission works very well and would probably allow a 10x reduction in building costs, if safety regulations were sane and risk appropriate.
But the regulations are in place. It is keeping people from building. And “competitive” plants are large mega-projects (notable exceptions are: Last Energy, Copenhagen Atomics, Oklo, Holosgen, USNC, Radiant), which are so slow and expensive to build right now in the West, that it is hard for them to get financed. Public perception is also a huge problem for fission, and not for fusion at the moment.5
I am grateful that people are trying to improve the world in this way.
It’s great that they have fun while they are sticking it to the killjoys.
I would love to see there colleagues working on fission joining them.
We could all profit from that.
There are still hundreds of millions of people that consume less electricity than the average American fridge
Some people claim that ALL of the distribution is unjust and the result of some form of oppression or -ism.
They try to mitigate that by instituting for example ESG, which tries to infuse a certain political agenda into the businesses, to supposedly fix the injustices.
There are people critcizing this idea as creating an “executive aristocracy”, that expropriates shareholders in the name of some political goals without democratic legitimation.
Isn’t it interesting how our priors and assumptions shape our conclusions?
Deuterium-Tritium is the most common choice, because it is the “easiest” fuel to ignite. Hydrogen-Boron11 has some unique advantages, like producing almost no neutrons and possibly erasing the need for a heat engine to create electricity. Deuterium-Deuterium, Deuterium-Helium3 and Hydrogen-Lithium are also investigated by some of these companies.