LP Vol. 29 - The Looming Nuclear Renaissance
Despite all the talk of the Green New Deal, massive infrastructure spending and the pervasive talk about climate change, transitioning America's energy infrastructure off of carbon-based sources is going to be perhaps the defining challenge of my lifetime. Not only is our reliance on oil and gas killing the planet, there is growing evidence that civilizational progress is hitting upon the limits our current energy supply:
J. Storrs Hall makes this case in his book Where is My Flying Car?, describing the societal stagnation that has been with us since the 1970s. Tyler Cowen has made a similar economics-centered argument in The Great Stagnation, and a "this concept expressed as a single chart-dominated website" version is available at https://wtfhappenedin1971.com.
In a review of Flying Car, Jason Crawford summarizes Hall's argument for why energy consumption is the limiting reagent of civilizational progress:
All else being equal, energy efficiency is great. But there’s no reason to believe that flatlining or declining resource usage is optimal for progress. A large part of progress is harnessing ever-more resources and putting them to productive use. And indeed, we’re going to need lots more energy if we’re ever going to get nanotech manufacturing, regular space travel, and of course flying cars. In fact, a good explanation for technological stagnation is that the only technological revolution of the last 50 years, computing, was the only one that didn’t need more power than could be provided by the technology of the 1970s.
Where will all this energy come from? It could come from solar: the amount of power reaching the Earth from the Sun is some 10,000 times greater than the current power requirements of humanity. Of course, it’s hard to harness in practice, owing to cloud cover and pesky inconveniences such as nighttime, but that’s nothing a well-placed fleet of a quintillion remote-controlled aerostats in the stratosphere couldn’t handle.
But the majority of the energy discussion in the book focuses on the amazing potential of nuclear. The upshot is that we ought to have nuclear-powered everything. Nuclear homes with local, compact reactors—they don’t need to be on the grid. Nuclear cars, whether flying or ground. Even nuclear batteries—I was shocked to learn that certain designs of nuclear batteries were actually manufactured decades ago and used safely in implantable pacemakers.
Now, innovation cycles are long, and good ideas eventually push their way in front of all the bad ones tried and failed, but a renaissance for nuclear power is fast approaching:
Oklo is a 30-person startup pioneering a revolutionary micro-reactor design capable of 5-10 MW of power for rural and other hard to reach communities that can't rely on traditional grid investments
Helion Fusion announced a $500m investment from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel to produce a working fusion reactor in a shipping container sized enclosure capable of producing 50 MW of power (enough to heat 40k homes or power a large data center) by 2025
Bill Gates funded TerraPower is building a 345 MW facility in Wyoming, using a Natrium-based fission design meant to address cooling and pressure risks that were the cause of the Fukushima disaster in 2011
While renewables like solar and wind will certainly represent a growing piece of both the national and global energy production puzzle, the next decade of development on next generation nuclear designs will be crucial for two major reasons:
Safety considerations aside, nuclear represents the most efficient source of carbon-free 'firm' energy generation - production isn't impacted by lack of sunshine or when the wind dies down
20% of America's total electricity is generated from just 93 operating sites. This makes up 50% of America's current carbon-free electricity
What happens when you take nuclear power offline? Anti-nuclear sentiment surged in Germany after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011. As the German state actively dismantled operational reactors, to make up for the power shortfall they were mainly replaced with additional coal plants, which led to an additional 36m tons of annual CO2 emissions, or an increase of 5%.
Without viable progress on next-gen nuclear designs we are going to move backwards faster than we realize if we don't have serious replacements lined up for our age-ing nuclear infrastructure.
Let's Not Yet 50 Years of Scar Tissue Distract Us from Progress
An economy powered by nuclear energy has the greatest potential for accelerating us towards the science fiction future of our dreams. We literally have the technology to make limitless carbon-free electricity, but decades of intellectual neglect and the slow boil of climate damage has not caused us to invest appropriately in solving the manufacturing, operational and political risk of expanding nuclear's role in the solution:
I want to leave you this weekend with two longreads that dive deep into the regulatory and scientific challenges heroic individuals and companies are wrestling with to move nuclear into the future:
A New Generation of Nuclear Reactors Could Hold the Key to a Green Future
Our current nuclear capacity isn’t just aging, it’s increasingly expensive to maintain:
The cooling tower of the Hope Creek nuclear plant rises 50 stories above Artificial Island, New Jersey, built up on the marshy edge of the Delaware River. The three reactors here—one belonging to Hope Creek, and two run by the Salem Generating Station, which shares the site—generate an astonishing 3,465 megawatts of electricity, or roughly 40% of New Jersey’s total supply. Construction began in 1968, and was completed in 1986. Their closest human neighbors are across the river in Delaware. Otherwise the plant is surrounded by protected marshlands, pocked with radiation sensors and the occasional guard booth. Of the 1,500 people working here, around 100 are licensed reactor operators—a special designation given by the NRC, and held by fewer than 4,000 people in the country.
As the epitome of critical infrastructure, this station has been buffeted by the crises the U.S. has suffered in the past few decades. After 9/11, the three reactors here absorbed nearly $100 million in security upgrades. Everyone entering the plant passes through metal- and explosives detectors, and radiation detectors on the way out. Walking between the buildings entails crossing a concrete expanse beneath high bullet resistant enclosures (BREs). The plant has a guard corp that has more members than any in New Jersey besides the state police, and federal NRC rules mean that they don’t have to abide by state limitations on automatic weapons.
The scale and complexity of the operation is staggering—and expensive. ”The place you’re sitting at right now costs us about $1.5 million to $2 million a day to run,” says Ralph Izzo, president and CEO of PSEG, New Jersey’s public utility company, which owns and operates the plants. “If those plants aren’t getting that in market, that’s a rough pill to swallow.” In 2019, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities agreed to $300 million in annual subsidies to keep the three reactors running. The justification is simple: if the state wants to meet its carbon-reduction goals, keeping the plants online is essential, given that they supply 90% of the state’s zero-carbon energy. In September, the Illinois legislature came to the same conclusion as New Jersey, approving almost $700 million over five years to keep two existing nuclear plants open. The bipartisan infrastructure bill includes $6 billion in additional support (along with nearly $10 billion for development of future reactors). Even more is expected in the broader Build Back Better bill. *
Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Breaks on Climate Change?
The degree of difficulty with solving the basic science of controlled Fusion reactions is insane:
Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had to find a way to heat matter to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun, so hot that atoms essentially melt into a cloud of charged particles known as plasma; they did that. They had to conceive of and build containers that could hold those plasmas; they did that, too, by making “bottles” out of strong magnetic fields. When those magnetic bottles leaked—because, as one scientist explained, trying to contain plasma in a magnetic bottle is like trying to wrap a jelly in twine—they had to devise further ingenious solutions, and, again and again, they did. Over decades, in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, scientists and engineers built giant metal doughnuts and Gehryesque twisted coils, they “pinched” plasmas with lasers, and they constructed fusion devices in garages. For thirty-six years, they have been planning and building an experimental fusion device in Provence. And yet commercially viable nuclear-fusion energy has always remained just a bit farther on. As the White Queen, in “Through the Looking Glass,” said to Alice, it is never jam today, it is always jam tomorrow.
The leading experimental Fusion design has been under discussion for longer than I’ve been alive. Progress in materials science is giving new hope that newer materials could be the solution to smaller, safer and more cost effective Fusion reactor designs:
Superconductors are materials that offer little to no resistance to the flow of electricity; for this reason, they make ideally efficient electromagnets, and magnets are the key component in tokamaks. A high-temperature superconductor—well, it opened up new possibilities, in the way that the vulcanization of rubber opened up possibilities in the mid-nineteenth century. The superconductor material that Whyte’s colleague was holding could in theory make a much more effective magnet than had ever existed, resulting in a significantly smaller and cheaper fusion device. “Every time you double a magnetic field, the volume of the plasma required to produce the same amount of power goes down by a factor of sixteen,” Whyte explained. Fusion happens when a contained plasma is heated to more than a hundred million degrees. Whyte asked his class to use this new material to design a compact fusion power plant of at least five hundred megawatts, enough to power a small city: “I was not sure what we would find with H.T.S., but I knew it would be innovative.” *
The bulk of US innovation has historically come out of MIT, but the last few decades of cheap domestic energy and anti-nuclear sentiment has dried up government funding for the exact kind of solutions we should be striving for:
On September 30, 2016, M.I.T.’s old experimental fusion device, which had been running for twenty-five years, was obliged to shut down by midnight. “This device graduated more than a hundred and fifty Ph.D.s,” Whyte said wistfully. “It set records, even though it’s a hundred times smaller than ITER.” Although M.I.T. was never told why the device was shut down—the Department of Energy continued to fund two other tokamak projects in the U.S.—there was speculation that the reason was that it was the smallest. “Which is ironic, because smaller is where we’re trying to go,” Whyte said. The researchers ran experiments on the machine until the last permitted minute. At 10:30 P.M., they set a world record for temperature and pressure. At midnight, they shared champagne.
Some combination of the lack of traditional government focus and innovation in other material constraints has shifted the funding focus to the private sector. Lots of fusion startups are all competing to get their first, and they are pursuing a variety of approaches:
There are at least twenty fusion startups now, all benefitting from technological advances in 3-D printing and artificial intelligence. The companies have different risks. TAE, in Orange County, California, uses a fuel, boron, that requires higher temperatures but generates no radioactive by-products. Physicists describe boron fusion as “elegant” and even “perfect,” if also, in certain ways, more difficult. Michl Binderbauer, the head of TAE, told me, “I don’t call these other companies my competitors, I call them my compatriots. We have the same goals, and it will be wonderful for any of us to get there.”
I'm hopeful to see not just the solving of impossibly hard questions of science, physics and materials engineering (holding super hot plasma in a magnetic field is some wild shit), but the manufacturing and regulatory adaptations necessary to operate these solutions at scale.
Have a great weekend!
W