LP Vol. 32 - Sunday SIND
Fusion and Nuclear Follow-Up, Waiting for Omicron, and Geopolitical Gray Zones
This weekend I wanted to highlight a smattering of stories across some of our recent deep dives on nuclear power and COVID, as well as tease out some geopolitical shifts that have caught my eye. Away we go!
🎧Podcast: Fusion Redux
Following up on our recent journey through the nuclear renaissance, I came across this recent podcast featuring the CEO of First Light Fusion, a UK startup focused on inertial confinement:
AZEEM AZHAR: You’ve chosen to go down the inertial confinement approach. What are the advantages of it?
NICK HAWKER: One of the big advantages that we have is that we have a process that we can simulate. The physics of the process is amenable to simulation is attractable thing to simulate. The kind of advent of the computing power that we now have, and the simulation tools and methods that we now have make a huge, huge difference to the rapidity with which we can explore the parameter space. We are doing a campaign right now, an experimental campaign, it’s a 20 shot campaign, and we’ve done over 100,000 simulations going into the design of that campaign. So all of that learning that we’re able to do in Silico [00:13:17] allows us to make much more rapid progress than we would be able to make otherwise.
Whole episode is worth a listen (there's also a readable transcript for those who prefer reading to audio).
The Evolving Politics of Nuclear
California provides an ongoing example of the political refactoring that will be required to assess nuclear's role in the future of non-carbon energy production. Bowing to political pressure, the Diablo Canyon power pant will close in 2024. Per CNBC:
The picture is confusing: California is closing its last operating nuclear power plant, which is a source of clean power, as it faces an energy emergency and a mandate to eliminate carbon emissions.
Why?
The explanations vary depending on which of the stakeholders you ask. But underlying the statewide diplomatic chess is a deeply held anti-nuclear agenda in the state.
“The politics against nuclear power in California are more powerful and organized than the politics in favor of a climate policy,” David Victor, professor of innovation and public policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, told CNBC.
Here is an expert commentator summarizing the situation with aplomb:
Waiting for Omicron
David Wallace-Wells is out with a new article on the state of play between the US medical community and COVID. It's not going great:
The new variant is not arriving in a country in which the pandemic is well under control but in a country where Delta is merely stalled, with at least half as many new cases being reported each day as were recorded during the peak of this wave; where because of waning immunity and low uptake of boosters, considerably more vulnerable seniors are losing vaccine protection daily than are gaining protection through new vaccinations; where among the population as a whole, vaccine protection is not just not rising fast enough to meet a new threat but actually falling from already disappointing levels; where the worst season for respiratory viruses like this one is also upon us (and although seasonality has not been precisely predictive in this pandemic, the worst period so far took off in December 2020 and ended in March of 2021); and where, over the last month, despite relatively widespread vaccination and quite high levels of immune protection from exposure to the disease itself, there are still enough vulnerable people out there for more than a thousand of them to be dying in a single day. That is a rate equivalent to 400,000 annual deaths, more than were recorded either in 2020 or so far in 2021.
In a conversation with Andrew Sullivan, Wallace-Wells concludes that the power of the vaccine has fought the increased transmission and virulence of Delta to a draw.
Ross Douthat had a particularly lucid critique of the Biden Administration's poor leadership and continued meandering response to factions of the bureaucracy that continue to operate like speed is not a variable to optimize around:
The most obvious examples of this passivity are booster shots and at-home testing. A big push for boosters should have begun once we had reasonable evidence of waning vaccine effectiveness — which is to say, in late summer or early fall. Instead Biden promised boosters but the public health bureaucracy resisted, and we had a period of partial availability and mixed messaging that gave way to general recommendation only around Thanksgiving. As a result, in booster shots, the United States is behind countries like Britain — not because of Fox News or vaccine hesitancy, but because the executive branch lost months to internal disagreement. At-home rapid testing, meanwhile, has been a long-running disaster, with the United States lagging many European countries in making these tests available and cheap, thanks in part to the same kind of bureaucratic overcaution that delayed the booster rollout. And almost a year into this presidency, the Biden White House now plans to widen access to these tests by having insurers reimburse their cost — adding a layer of bureaucratic hassle for consumers, instead of just spending more money directly to make them all but free.
The evidence is clear that boosters are a necessary intervention to protect against waning immunity from the dual threats of Delta and Omicron. Although I feel like the pandemic is ever closer to being behind me on a personal level, I am very nervous about needing any kind of non-COVID medical care this winter. The continued lack of decisive action on cheap testing will continue to hurt us if future variants evolve past our vaccine defenses.
Eric Topol has the best summary I’ve seen thus far on the overall state of play with regards to Omicron and how those defenses are stacking up:
Gray Zones and Turkish Drones ($)
While the world's attention may have been predominantly occupied by COVID the last two years, all is not well on the geopolitical front. The Biden administration announced a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Beijing olympics, and the winter months of the European energy market are likely to exacerbate the delicate dance between US, its allies, and Russia over Ukraine and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Among this chatter, it's worth familiarizing yourself with the concept of Gray Zone conflict:
What is the Gray Zone?
The United States Special Operations Command says it’s "competitive interactions among and within state and non-state actors that fall between the traditional war and peace duality." The Center for Strategic and International Studies says the Gray-Zone is "the contested arena somewhere between routine statecraft and open warfare." The British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace called the Gray-Zone "that limbo land between peace and war." See the British Government’s Strategic Command backgrounder here. Dr. David Kilcullen describes Russia’s preferred approach as “liminal warfare” which involves ‘riding the edge of observability, surfing the threshold of detectability’ so that others either do not perceive or cannot ascribe a cause to the hostile activity that is underway.
...
The Head of the Russian Army, Valery Gerasimov called it “non-linear warfare. His definition sums up the new “anything goes” environment. He famously said, “Wars are no longer declared, and having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template…the role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness. The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures – applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population. All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special operations forces.”
I would love to believe that future large scale military conflicts will be few and far between, but I fear pervasive Gray Zone skirmishes may not be much of a consolation prize.
For those conflicts that tip over into kinetic operations, this deep dive ($) on the drone-focused Turkish defense contractor Baykar gets at the heart of asymmetric technological threats on the modern battlefield:
In September 2020, Azerbaijani soldiers invaded the region, occupied by Armenia since the end of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1994. The Armenians expected that their superior knowledge of the mountainous and heavily fortified terrain would suffice for them to emerge victorious. Given their existing control of the area, they did not have to win an offensive war against Azerbaijan, they simply had to repel or outlast the invasion. But a few months earlier, Azerbaijan had purchased Bayraktar drones from Turkey. Over a month and a half of fighting, the drones would prove decisive for Azerbaijan. Armenian forces were repeatedly caught by surprise deep behind the frontlines, largely without the protection of electronic spoofing or inflatable dummy vehicles that could have deceived drone operators. The attrition rate of Armenian armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) was so catastrophically high¹¹ that Azerbaijani ground forces were able to seize territory quickly and cheaply, no matter how defensible it appeared on paper. After only 44 days of combat, the Armenians gave in and a ceasefire transferred much of the territory Azerbaijan had lost in 1994 back to its control, including all of the southern region of Nagorno-Karabakh itself.
Neither Armenia¹² nor Azerbaijan¹³ are wealthy enough to operate large fleets of fighter jets, so drones are an attractive alternative to control the skies. But even in wealthier countries, fighter jets are still scarce commodities, and the crews who operate them are perhaps even harder to replace. A Bayraktar TB-2 that might cost $5 million or less doesn’t need to be as resilient as an F-16 jet costing $30 million, or an F-35 costing $90 million, not including the costs of missiles, pilot training, and maintenance. The difference is even more stark at the level of operating costs: an hour’s flying time for a F-35 is estimated by some analysts to cost around $60,000¹⁴ while the TB-2’s hourly operating cost is thought to be under $1000.
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What drones can do for Turkey, they can do for other middle and minor powers too. The most consequential effect of Turkey’s success in drone development and manufacturing is likely to be a proliferation of increasingly powerful and cost-effective drones among smaller and less wealthy states that previously would not have been able to afford the same kind of airpower.
The harried end to the war in Afghanistan combined with a sclerotic response to COVID from both a public health and economic perspective has pierced the perception of US prowess on the global stage. I expect the world to be a much more chaotic and confusing place in the next three decades than it has been in the last three.
Expect more geopolitical internet spelunking in the weeks and months ahead.
Until next week, W