Ezra Klein thinks J. Storrs Hall's Where Is My Flying Car? is simplistic and obtuse:
But Hall’s book is worth struggling with because he’s right about two big things. First, that the flattening of the energy curve was a moment of civilizational import and one worth revisiting. And second, that many in politics have abandoned any real vision of the long future. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our politics mainly to give voice to our fears or urgency to our agendas. We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible.
This is a good point, and one that's bothered me for a long time. If you ever wonder why so many people are in dismal spirits these days, this is part of the reason: both major factions of American political life are based on a diet of almost pure unhappiness. Modern conservatism is based on an endless sense of grievance and resentment, while liberalism is mostly based on outrage over the unfairness of modern society. Listening to Democrats and Republicans over the past couple of decades, you would barely know that life has gotten better by leaps and bounds for nearly everyone. And yet it's so.
On Ezra's second point, I'll make one addition: the real thing we've lost sight of is the world made possible by abundant energy and intelligence. Those are the only two things that progress requires, and we're not very far away from having them both. What's more, they're complementary: abundant intelligence helps to create new and abundant energy sources while abundant energy sources are required to power abundant intelligence.
Now, this is not everything. Energy and intelligence are necessary but not sufficient. Even if both were in almost infinite supply, we could still decide to kill ourselves in a nuclear war and we could still decide to indulge our prejudices and animosities even if we don't have anything to gain by it.
That said, the next 30 or 40 years will be the most important in the history of the human race. Large and growing amounts of clean energy and artificial intelligence will allow us to create just about anything permitted by the laws of physics—if we're able to overcome our own lizard brains and use them in tolerably fair and responsible ways. I'd say that's about a 50-50 proposition.
The book had some interesting stuff, but a lot of it felt pretty hokey - especially the stuff on cold fusion and nanotechnology (the flying cars were never going to happen because of the noise issues).
The nuclear stuff kind of falls victim to something that writer Austin Vernon pointed out recently, which is that a lot of pro-nuclear folks assume that nuclear would be profitable and successful even if a regulatory regime was more favorable. That's very questionable.
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I've said it before. We've had flying cars since the 1940s. We just call them helicopters. And it's not noise that prevents them from being a consumer product. It's safety and expense.
If I may ask, where's my cheap, safe, and quiet flying car?
I don't understand this comment. At all. Do you see any typos or elisions in your post? In particular your second to the last sentence?
Very few politicians have ever had "any real vision of the long future". One of the advantages of monarchies is that monarchs (and lower ranking hereditary aristocrats) tend to think not just of their own future but of the futures of their children and grandchildren. Politicians in democracies seldom think much past the next election cycle.
That's why I tended to support Yang; he may be a bit kookie but he genuinely does have a vision of the future past the next election.
And yet we have the actual history of actual America...
America operated in a particular way up until about the mid-60s, then stopped operating that way. You can't pin that on "democracy" or "elections" or "politicians".
We all have our own theories, but me theory is that too many adults in America stopped appreciating that
- things have downsides as well as upsides and demanded that nothing ever have a downside
- even downsides are frequently temporary. You have some hassle, you get over it, life goes on.
I suspect the Greatest Generation were greatest precisely because the two wars created a generation that massively imbibed the reality of tradeoffs, and was not paralyzed by them.
BUT they wanted to protect their kids from having to ever worry about tradeoffs, and in the process killed the golden goose.
I'm much less sanguine than Kevin about the future being a 50-50 proposition for this reason. It wasn't stochastics that slowed things down in the mid-60s, it was feedback. And that feedback will continue (growing larger each generation) until (probably through catastrophe) society recalibrates to a better sense of how tradeoffs work.
The cheap and abundant energy from burning fossil fuels was probably a one-time event in the history of humanity. The construction, installation and maintenance of large scale renewable energy source require enormous resources, both in energy and natural raw material because of its very low energy density compared to fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. This will certainly not be cheap and also not very clean. And let's stop calling fusion energy cheap. It will be far from it if and when it ever happens.
The cheap energy of fossil fuels did have many positive effects, chief among it is probably that we don't need to enslave people anymore for a higher standard of living. But there are also many very destructive consequences such as that it allowed an unsustainable population growth.
Limitations in battery technology mainly. Solar panels are pretty good and wind mills are not bad--in the right locations.
One way around battery limitations is to have electric cars serve as grid backups when plugged in.
The full life-cycle and full-system energy cost of solar energy systems is likely grossly underestimated due to the fact that most is built using the extremely cheap (and dirty) energy from coal in China.
What leads you to believe that existing life-cycle analysis do not take into account the costs, emissions and energy use of material extraction, production and manufacturing for solar systems?
A life cycle analysis without the upstream factors isn't actually a life cycle analysis.
What makes you think they do? Did you actually read any of these studies? I'm guessing you know that the burden of proof is to show that these life cycle analyses do include the costs of environment degradation, not on anyone else to show that they don't.
So why don't you give us a cite or two?
lol, oh I see.
When you make an unsupported claim on the internet, the burden of proof is cleaery on the people who ask for evidence of your claim.
Clearly. lol.
You are winning the internet.
Oh, dear Lord, do we have to do this? Okay, I've had a look at a number of analyses and I couldn't find anything pertaining to this discussion. So the ball's in your court. Please cite a few of those studies you insist exists.
This has been a free lesson on burden of proof requirements for the respective parties that you should have learned in high school, had you been paying attention.
and before we declare cold fusion as "mission accomplished" . . .
iiuc the current experiment involves a facility 3 football fields in length,
and produced enough energy to heat a pot of tea water
Do you think 30-40 years will be enough ?
Given the massive investment in fossil fuel extraction/processing infrastructure and the need for this infrastructure to be operational 24/7 to keep the fossil fuels moving to their end use, it's not clear that your argument is correct.
It's easily imaginable to get to to the point that renewable energy is significantly cheaper and more widely available than fossil fuel energy. In fact, we are almost there....you don't need to do much imagining at this point.
Given the low, low operating costs of renewable energy as well as the massive improvements in air quality (even ignoring global warming) and reductions in pollution/extraction related deaths, it's pretty easy to imagine that history will look back on renewable energy as an explosion in living standards, similar to the improvements seen from the fossil fuel age.
What the future will look like with limitless, cheap energy and millions of saved lives each year is hard to imagine clearly....but it's not hard to see the potential is there.
We're 'almost there' eh? Cites please. Also, your unambiuous definition of 'almost there'.
I am afraid I am not sharing your optimism. The truly cheap fossil fuel both in terms of energy to be invested for drilling and digging as well as monetary cost has dominated and, I would say, distorted our thinking and our views of what is possible. Everything that goes into the construction, installation and maintenance of solar energy systems is fueled by coal, oil and gas. That goes for the manufacturing, the production of all metals and all concrete, construction of all the necessary facilities, feeding of all the workers, ... So, a true full life-cycle study is very difficult to perform.
As a life-long experimental physicist I am always skeptical of paper studies and much prefer experimental data, especially for such a critical issue. I would be convinced that solar energy collection using silicon actually works and works better than what plants already do if a demonstration plant would produce complete solar energy systems using only the energy input from solar energy systems. This would actually demonstrate "break even" for solar energy. To produce energy for use by society there has to be also some extra energy beyond the demonstration. Such a demonstration project would be expensive, but I think it is necessary before we count on solar energy to be the replacement for fossil fuel. Note that we should demand a similar "break even" demonstration of all new energy sources, certainly of fusion energy but maybe also of nuclear power.
It's not clear why this is important.
Would you argue that any measurement of the value or cost of robots is meaningless unless only robots are involved in the construction and sourcing of new robots?
It's not clear why solar 'doesn't work' until 100% of the economy is using solar. Clearly this doesn't make any sense.
If solar can only function at 95 or 85 or 55% of the total power demand.....it is still providing a lot of power and we can measure the costs and environmental impacts of of upstream uses of fossil energy when analyzing the total impact/cost of solar power.
Think about how crazy it would be to argue that we can't measure the life cycle cost/impact of anything as long as more than one type of thing is used upstream. Can't measure trains because cars are used upstream. Can't measure vegetables because cows provide calories. Can't measure cars because trains exist. Cant measure beef because vegetables provide calories. Can't measure gas power plants because solar and wind provide power.
This makes no sense.
To built solar energy systems using only the energy from solar energy systems would simulate the sustainability of this energy source without being subsidized from other energy sources. This is a fundamental requirement for anything that claims to be an energy source and not an energy sink. You are correct that this demonstration doesn't have to get its energy from solar energy systems but then the accounting for all input energy has to be truly complete, something that is quite difficult since fossil fuel is permeating everything we do.
This situation reminds me of the Biosphere 2 project that tried to simulate a working biosphere closed off from our biosphere. It should have tested whether biological systems can survive on another planet. It failed because not all needs of a sustainable biosphere were recognized. I am afraid we have a similar situation here where the proponents of solar energy claim to have counted all the input energy but when we actually want to stop the use of fossil fuels we will find out that not everything was included. That is what I wanted to test with this demonstration, but there might be better ways of doing this.
"that it allowed an unsustainable population growth."
The intellegentsia packaging for "allowed people not to literally starve to death in such numbers."
I am sorry. My phrasing came out pretty callous. We should, of course, do everything we can to keep people from starving and fossil fuels have been exceptionally effective in providing food to the world, especially with the green revolution. But the fact remains that we have reached or exceeded the carrying capacity of our planet, which would not have happened without the discovery of fossil fuels and for which we don't have a proven solution.
The framing of this bothers me. Both sides are concerned about the future of the human condition. When you listen to John Lennon's Imagine he doesn't talk about a future of flying cars or anything related to technology; he talks about a (progressive) future where everyone is accepted.
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
What good is it to have plentiful energy but for its technology to be limited to rich nations and rich people in rich nations?
Je suis d'accord. This world, our wide human culture needs to...step out from itself. Would the advent of the energy sources and computational power open the door or would we have to open it ourselves to usher in those technological marvels?
👍👍
I don't believe it's true that "liberalism is mostly based on outrage over the unfairness of modern society". I'm not sure it serves any purpose at all to pontificate about the emotions that liberalism is "based on". Liberalism is a set of values and principles for improving the functioning of our societies, not an exercise in righteous indignation.
Many liberals are certainly angry that so little progess has been made in achieving greater social justice (more so in the US than most other first world countries), but this is far from the entire ideology of "liberalism". There is also great sadness and frustration that the human race has squandered its birthright; that the planet is degrading before our eyes, with an increasingly inhospitable climate and the relentless destruction of the remaining natural world. The enlightenment offered so much promise for a world with more joy and social progress, yet delivered little more than an endless torrent of consumer goods and the commodification of every aspect of daily life. Human beings seem no more inclined to make decisions based on evidence and logic than they were in the Dark Ages.
It's only true that "life has gotten better by leaps and bounds for nearly everyone" if one frames the question in narrow economic terms. Yes life expectancy has increased, but has the quality of that life really improved? Is a family with two (separated) parents working multiple jobs to afford a good middle class way of life for their child, really having a better life than a 1950s family where one breadwinner could support a large family in a leafy suburban home? Opinions may differ on these and related questions, but not every aspect of the human condition can be reduced to data and expressed on a chart.
The forces of individual greed and bigotry remain dominant in human society, and there is no reason to be optimistic about the direction they will take it. That will remain so no matter how many "things" corporations are permitted to make in future.
"liberalism is mostly based on outrage over the unfairness of modern society."
Why does Klein think it's a bad thing to try to eliminate unfairness, inequality and cruelty? And while material wealth has increased, inequality has also increased in the US.
Of course there is a sizable branch of the left which emphasizes outrage and punishment as a type of partisanship, rather than correction of inequality, but this is not the main objective of liberalism or the Democratic party.
Some of the negativity that Klein refers to comes from the recent predominance of social media, with algorithms that prioritize anger, criticism and grievance. So if you are online, you are inundated with that sort of messaging. Reading books and longer form articles reveals, especially in the wide spectrum from center right to left progressive, a much more thoughtful, hopeful at times, and nuanced argument.
Also, some progressives in politics, notably Biden, but also someone like Jayapal, are very positive....as was Obama. Remember, "Yes, we can"? I'm thinking also of Hakim Jeffries inspiring alphabetical list in his speech to the House after McCarthy finally won the Speaker vote.
There's a lot that's positive and forward looking in the progressive agenda.
I'm not saying the world is great, but life is so very much better than it was. You can't have a quality of life if you are dead. Nearly everyone in the United States lives better than the richest person in the world a few hundred years ago.
The world is bad. The world used to be worse. The world could be much better.
All three are true. (Our World in Data)
"if we're able to overcome our own lizard brains and use them in tolerably fair and responsible ways. I'd say that's about a 50-50 proposition."
50-50 sounds about right to me, although I agree with Yogi Berra -- 'It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.'
And I basically agree that human beings have a stupefying talent for making themselves miserable. Here we are, in the first half a decade or so, living in a country where most people are as free from material want as ever they have been. But it's not enough, and we torture ourselves and others to get more. If Kevin and I have enough perspective to see this, one reason may be because our serious illnesses cause us to appreciate the simple pleasure of well-being when we have it.
The lizard-brain has the upper hand. As David Hume has explained, " reason is the slave of passions." The larger part of what is called "reasoning" is just the rationalization or our desires. I am indebted to Donald Trump's rabid follower's for illustrating this so clearly.
Which is no argument for abandoning reason.
Thanks so very much for this. A friend of mine made this point after we visited the Science and Technology museum in Chicago in 1991. I talk about it more in https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Although I take issue with "the most important period in human history." I think the height of the Cold War has it beat. Just because we didn't blow ourselves to kingdom come doesn't mean it wasn't a greater threat than global warming and AI.
I think the height of the Cold War has it beat. Just because we didn't blow ourselves to kingdom come doesn't mean it wasn't a greater threat than global warming and AI.
You think there's currently an appreciably lower chance of nuclear war now than there was during the Cold War? I'd say we've nearly caught up in terms of that particular risk.
I agree, though, it's a much more dangerous risk than climate change.
Yeah, I do think that we were way closer to global nuclear war at several points in the past. Cuban Missile Crisis being the most well-known, but not the only.
We don't need a nuclear war - the water wars will do just fine. We are already in a slow motion catastrophe. The technological developments and the changes within ourselves aren't something to aim for, they are necessities to exist in the future. If you can imagine an ecosystem similar to the one we enjoy now in that future, that is.
I must have spent too much of my adolescence reading social history, because the present seems pretty great. But I put a very high value on modern sanitation systems (they kept us from dying in jnfancy) and modern dentistry and pain medication (keeping our daily lives more enjoyable).
There certainly are problems and inequities today, but people seem unhappier and more worried than they need to be based on the fundamentals. People seem so willing to write off civilization now, and to let everything crash and burn. Yet nineteenth century Chicago rebuilt after the fire AND lifted downtown to deal with flooding, AND changed the flow of the Chicago river. They figured out how to deal with environmental dangers. I can't even fathom how many houses shifted from giant coal furnaces to more efficient and cleaner gas boilers/furnaces during the mid 20th century, and yet people today think we won't be able to change our energy consumption patterns. Somehow our more poorly educated and much financially poorer ancestors did it just fine.
Like +50.
Cephelopod and Salamander, you might like the environmental chapter of this: https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
BTW, Matty made the point about the need to pursue abundant energy rather than energy conservation, back in Oct 2021 -- https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance
I think in the short term this is a false choice. If not for need for energy conservation, there would be little incentive to create LED lights and make things more efficient.
Still, as I've been complaining for forever, we really need to pick up spending on R&D on fusion. The more we subsidize, the sooner we'll clear hurdles and hit milestones.
Still, as I've been complaining for forever, we really need to pick up spending on R&D on fusion.
I think spending more on fusion research surely makes sense. But on the other hand, there's a lot of uncertainty about just how "all in" we ought to go. It seems overwhelmingly likely fusion will one day take care of much (maybe nearly all) of civilization's energy needs. But even with a lot more money, it's still very hard to predict the timeline of its arrival. Are we talking 30 years before we see the realization and rapid expansion of viable fusion energy technology? Or are we talking 70 years? The latter timeline isn't near enough to be of much help with the climate crisis (and frankly even the fromer wouldn't move the needle very much on global temperature average, either).
Predicting the arrival of fusion power is maybe not as useful as just applying basic project management triangle.
We have a fixed scope/quality required. We can either lengthen the time to completion or increase the budget.
We have a fixed scope/quality required. We can either lengthen the time to completion or increase the budget.
There are no guarantees merely "increasing the budget" will gift us with some specified reduction in the elapsed time required to bring fusion energy production to commercial viability. I myself favor spending more: but just how much more is a legitimate question, when, of course, we have finite resources, and we really must do everything in our power to mitigate climate change. One of the "things in our power" is avoiding misallocation of said resources, or making bad bets (such as overspending on a technology that clearly won't arrive quickly enough to offer substantive with respect to the crisis that's already here).
If you look at the plausible predictions with respect to climate change, you'll be aware humanity really needs to make substantial progress over the next thirty years. I'm not a pessimist when it comes to fusion, but it's abundantly clear its large-scale emergene won't arrive in time to affect the immediate crisis.
Uh, why, exactly? It appears to be a much more complicated and fragile technology than fission. Also more expensive in terms of capital investment. I'm not against R & D dollars being allocated for nuclear fusion. I just don't see why this it's something that deserves massive amounts of man-hours and money.
The capital cost is unknowable, given that there is no working reactor producing energy. However, the capital investment into fusion research in the last 5 years is less than a quarter of a single light-water reactor currently being built.
Of course, you're comparing costs in the same five-year span, and of course, you've been careful in research to the costs accruing from lawsuits, construction delay, and so on and so forth. But here's a much better comparison to my way of thinking: the costs of developing Gen IV/modular reactors vs the costs of developing nuclear fusison. Further, why try to swallow camels when you're straining at gnats? Finally, say that the costs of deployment for nuclear fusion ... and then proceed to go ahead and make a comparison anyway?
There is more money being poured into Gen IV reactors (for research and NRC permitting) than development of fusion, right now, in the US.
I haven't tracked development of Gen IV reactors outside of US on account of a lack of transparency and translated, searchable materials.
So you're comparing two unknowns, but it's the other guys fault that your doing so? Got it.
When are people going to realize that Fusion is not "clean"? It is only "less dirty." The products of deuterium-tritium fusion are one helium plus one neutron. The flux of neutrons causes isotopic changes in everything near the reaction so that the equipment housing the reaction has a rather short lifetime before it loses structural integrity. Then the entire very radioactive reactor has to be de-commissioned and somehow stored safely for thousands of years (sound familiar?). By the way, those neutrons are partly why Lawrence Livermore is interested -- they are also handy for making plutonium out of uranium 238.
I thank you for your concise assessment of the current state of the art. Howerver, in answer to your question, the reply is 'never'. I've explained the problems associated with neutron bombardment many times, and many times to the same people at that. And backed my explanations by doing a copy/paste from very reputable organizations ... many times to the same people. These same people never bother to offer a rebuttal to my documentation, preferring instead to vanish into the ether. Sometime later, the very same people will make the very same assertion, thus repeating the cycle. If I seem somewhat testy with certain people here, it's because of their history of participation.
Half-life:
Plutonium-239 (byproduct waste of fission) = 24K years
Tritium = 12 years
Are there materials used in the wall that, radiated, would remain contaminated for thousands of years? No. ITER:
The most likely candidates with the longest activated radiation are Titanium-44 -- 63 years -- and Nickel-63 -- 100 years.
Uh, are you reading ITER's PR releases? This is what real sourcing looks like:
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ #
Abstract
Highly radioactive waste is generated in fusion reactors by neutron irradiation of the reactor blanket. All major elements of construction, i.e. the alloy constitutents of stainless steel, the moderator (graphite) and the neutron multipliers (beryllium, bismuth or lead) as well as the impurities in each of these are likely to be activated. So, for every stable element of the periodic table we have estimated the activity with half life T > 10 years produced during the expected operating lifetime of a typical fusion reactor.
METHODS
The radioactive inventories of all chemical elements are evaluated after an operation time at which either reactor type has produced 1 GWthyr of energy. In view of the resulting long isolation times for the radioactive waste it is conservatively assumed that eventually (a) the entire long lived radioactive inventory enters into the biosphere, and (b) the radioactive elements have forgotten their origin and behave like the corresponding natural elements. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) guidelines specify their permissible concentrations in drinking water. The evaluation uses two types of characteristic quantities. Both decrease over time, as given by the radioisotopes' specific half lives:
Biological Hazard Potential, BHP, (m3), the maximum amount of permissibly contaminated drinking water that any element of the reactor can produce. Its numerical value is roughly equal to the maximum radiological dose (in rem) a population will receive when the entire radioactive inventory of that reactor element has entered into the population's biosphere ("potential population dose"). As long as BHP > 0.8 m3 (equivalent to a population dose of 0.5 rem), the inventory of the radioactive element is assumed to be hazardous.
Specific activity, the radioactivity of a gram of any element from the reactor (Ci/g). Due to its radioactivity, any element's concentration in drinking water must not exceed a certain limit cp. That limit is compared with the range of concentrations ce found in natural waters. As long as cp < ce the element itself (not only its inventory) is considered hazardous.
RESULTS
(1) Biological Hazard Potential (Figs. 4a, b)
The radiological data for bismuth and beryllium are unknown and had to be conservatively assumed.
The long lived population doses originating from fission reactor waste are (arranged by half life)
1.0 108 rem (Am243, T = 7.4 103 yr),
3.5 109 rem (Pu239, T = 2.4 104 yr),
1.4 106 rem (Np237, T = 2.1 106 yr).
The long lived population doses originating from fusion reactor waste are (arranged by half life)
4 107 rem (Ni63, T = 102 yr),
1 104 rem (Ni59, T = 7.5 104 yr),
6 108 rem (Bi208, T = 3.7 105 yr),
4 106 rem (Be10, T = 1.6 106 yr), and
3 104 rem (Pb205, T = 1.4 107 yr).
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ #
Wow. It looks like your source is just so much biased hooey. My source is reputable. And here is the link so you can read it for yourself. That's only one of many cites I have produced over the years.
Just point to the source, please. That way, I can see the whole report.
Sorry about that; I specifically included the link at the end of my post. Here it is:
http://www.acamedia.info/sciences/J_G/fusion.html
I thought that was the study, but it wasn't clear that you would cite a 40 year old paper.
It was a hypothetical reactor design from 1983 and applied a limited scenario of leaks into ground water. IOW, don't build your facility at Hanford.
Environmental radiation exposure seems to be fairly low-risk, regardless of material. Chernobyl more or less confirmed this.
However, it does not mean that the waste is safe after 100 years. This, again, is confirmed by Chernobyl, or specifically, the Russian idiots who dug trenches in the contaminated soil.
The point is, the nucleotide's half-life still matters. You cannot just pull it out of storage and dump it in the municipal waste stream.
Feel free to explain why I'm wrong.
Funny, have half-lives changed that much in forty years? It was literally the very first cite I clicked on in a longish list of cites. Took me maybe five seconds to google it. Further, you _still_ have not addressed the fact that dealing with nuclear fusion waste is a real problem.
I could go on to cite the research over the last forty years for burning up the nasty fission products ... but somehow I don't think you will find it convincing 😉
All of which is beside the point because the problem of long-term storage of nuclear waste from both fission and fusion has already been solved. We just happened to go into the weeds to correct your misapprension. Not that you'll change your mind one whit anyway 😉
Oh dear God, I just realized that you read the last number as a digit instead of an expononet; Pu239 has a half-life of 2.4 x 10^4 years, not 104 years! Really? You are either incapable of parsing scientific notation or you didn't read the paper I linked to, which does show the exponents as a superscript.
Maybe these folks at Stanford are wrong, but if they're not...
"Small modular reactors, long touted as the future of nuclear energy, will actually generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants" -- https://bityl.co/Ga2B
Uh, I fail to see the point behind the post. Maybe I'm just obtuse, so could you expound in greater detail?
Ugh. Going to your source, it says the most radiocative wastes have the longest halt-lives ... when precisely the opposite is true. Tsk Tsk. In fact, there's an inverse relationship between half-life and radioactivity: the longer the half-life, the lower the radioactivy. Stuff that has a half-life of hours or days put off some pretty fierce alpha particles, neutrons, and such. Handling radium (half-life 5,000 can give you radiations burns as well as cancer. The same amount of Neptonium(half-life 2,000,000 years), well let's just say you ain't getting burned anytime soon 😉
Your argument is that nuclear waste does not need to be contained nearly as long as the annual exposure limit for radiation entails, is it?
I see where your distorted logic comes from now. You think direct exposure risk means that the waste is less hazardous if it has a long half-life, ergo, your earlier citation using rems.
Alright then. ADM, I hope you read that. SoV insists that Plutonium does not need to be safely stored as hazardous waste for very long, on account that the half-life is less critical than the amount of alpha and beta particles from the higher rate of decay events.
Your premise is 100% wrong according to SoV.
No, my argument is that since they got the relationship between half-life and radiaoctivity wrong -- in fact, exactly backwords -- this is an untrustworthy, dare I say, garbage cite.
And my cite is most definitively not.
This exchange has been interesting.
For what its worth, my original sources about fusion problems are informal discussions with some engineer friends who were designing fusion reactors. One of them was working on design of possible very small fusion reactors, where small size presumably could make fusion containment easier but would also experience more intense neutron flux simply due to proximity--the small reactors would have a rather short duty cycle. Another friend worked for a large corporation, and was assigned the general task of "find useful things to do with the neutrons." He (appropriately) didn't tell me if he found any, but his tone was pessimistic. That was a long time ago now.
I'm holding out for p-B reactions myself 🙂 The problem is one of materials design, particularly when the design goals are conflicting, say a good conductor of electricity and a poor conductor of heat. Or, say, demanding a good neutron reflector while at the same time having a short half-life 😉 That's the big problem with fusion in regard to the problem of waste disposal. That said, there are already (IMHO) solutions to radioactive waste disposal; the problem is political rather than scientific. By all means continue to fund fusion research; judicious in your distribution of what is a limited supply of dollars.
Aaargh! 'Amplifier', not 'reflector'.
The inertial confinement fusion experiments at Lawrence Livermore are not being done under the Department of Energy's Fusion Energy Sciences division, but rather under its National Nuclear Security Administration. Since the end of nuclear bomb tests, it is impossible to confirm the performance of new warhead designs or the reliability of warheads that have been in storage for dozens of years by actually testing them. The alternative is to use supercomputers to model nuclear explosions of the warheads. The problem with any computer model is the vulnerability to “garbage in, garbage out”. How to make sure your model is legit? Validate it against experimental data. How do get experimental data on what happens during nuclear fusion? The Lawrence Livermore inertial confinement fusion program is one way.
Conservatism is about harming others and increasing scarcity, liberalism is about eliminating those characteristics.
Conservatism tries to claim we want to eliminate those things, too, so where's the conflict, and liberalism believes this because it's about getting along with everyone.
So, who dies?
The unhappiness culture online is not the real world where most people live unaware of the daily outrages we discuss on sites like this one. Online thrives on spreading outrage for engagement. Most people I know are happy and optimistic about the future, and 100% believe we are better off today than at any time in history. Just look back at the last century with two World Wars, numerous other major wars, the Holocaust, filthy water and air, racism, etc.
Counterpoint (for argument's sake). In material terms humanity is better off than ever, but there's a reasonable case to be made that, in spite of this, our medium-long term outlook has decidedly deteriorated over the last 20-25 years:
By the end of the 1990s we were already seeing a massive reduction in global poverty; we were already seeing a steady slowdown in human population growth; we were already seeing a huge reduction in hunger; we were already seeing huge progress on vaccinations; we were already seeing a relentless drop in crime; and we were already seeing swift rises in trade flows (which, criticism by both left and right aside, is consistent with rising living standards and stronger economic growth). Moreover we were likewise seeing a big expansion in awareness of the threat of climate change (which is the first step to doing something about it). And critically, we found ourselves in an era that was seeing both the spread of democratic norms globally, and what appeared to be a sharp and hugely welcome decline in the risk of nuclear war, complete with steady, large scale decline in weapons arsenals. There was much cause for hope!
It's clear looking back that we've wasted precious time when it comes to climate change mitigation; the threat of nuclear warfare seems to grow by the day; democracy is either under threat or in retreat all over the world; high income countries have lost their minds when it comes to housing prices; and the arrival of a new, deadly pathogen has caused a significant increase in mortality in scores of countries. And the United States once again finds itself in a dangerous, tiresome and ruinously expensive Cold War. Oh, and violent crime is once again on the rise, as is anti-science nuttery and fantastically exotic conspiracy mongering.
It's not all bad, mind you. But it's not all good, either, and I don't think the optimism that characterized the zeitgeist of the end of the 20th century is warranted right now (though I'm hopeful it will return).
I don't mean to be a broken record, but if Nader / the Green Party had done what they said they would (not run in Florida in 2000), we could have continued to have nice things.
I've long had the feeling that election definitely was something of an inflection point in US history. Like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.
“…. and the left sees only the injustices of the present.”
One smaaaaaal point: One reason for some of the dissatisfaction of “liberals” (using that term loosely) is that being too satisfied with the slow progress of recent decades almost ignores the relatively lightening-strike victories of recent years, with more almost certain to come soon, by the people dead-set on dragging all of us back to their “good ol’ days.” It’s more than just “the unfairness of modern society.” So much has been gained, but a lot of that has been, and will continue to be, quickly and easily lost, if we stop fighting for progress.
(One example of how easily progress can be reversed is RBG, who because of what I charitably describe as a mistake (the unkind word would be “arrogance “) refused to retire when she was urged to do that so The O Man could nominate someone to preserve her legacy of fighting for Justice. Because of her mistake, in a few years much of what she achieved and stood for on the court, and before, will have disappeared. Almost like she never existed. I said almost.)
Satisfied in your “freedom”? Satisfied in your “progress”? As if they could never go away? Then don’t open your eyes.
(Sheesh, I’m scaring myself.)
Even focusing just on “clean energy.” That will turn out just dandy as long as we make it profitable enough for the right people. Part of the reason it has taken so long to get to where we are and hope to be soon is that profits for the right people dictated that we slow that roll. Where we are is where we should have been long ago if profits allowed it.
"Even if both were in almost infinite supply, we could still decide to kill ourselves in a nuclear war and we could still decide to indulge our prejudices and animosities even if we don't have anything to gain by it."
If this does happen, it's far more likely to happen from the conservatives' negative views of the future than from liberals' negative views of the future. Conservatives react to things they perceive as negative far more violently than liberals do, and "wanting more social/economic/environmental justice" isn't as amenable to being nuked into existence as "if white people can't control the world, nobody will" and "I look forward to the coming rapture when Jesus will be King again" are. (Perhaps a nuclear war *is* God's will for our fallen country now that the brown hordes are overtaking it!)
"Modern conservatism is based on an endless sense of grievance and resentment, while liberalism is mostly based on outrage over the unfairness of modern society."
In order to convince people that changes need to be made so that the future will be better, you kind of have to convince them that the present is not so great. Nothing about this incompatible with thinking about the "long future".
On the topic of all we need is intelligence: https://phys.org/news/2023-01-scientific-breakthroughs.amp we seem to be slowing down.
Well, yeah, it does appear that most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Which is my preferred phrasing as opposed to 'scientific breakthough', which is right up there with 'lone genius'.
I agree that much of the low hanging fruit has been picked. How many times can you discover something as momentous as gravity, quantum mechanics or Maxwell’s equations?
For thousands of years we stumbled around in the dark as far as the basics of how the world worked. In the last few hundred years we figured out the basics of how the world worked: gravity, atomic theory, electricity and magnetism, quantum mechanics, relativity.
If scientific development has been less spectacular it seems to me that engineering, the application of science, has been exploding. In the last ten years or more it seems that all of our technology has gotten hugely better and more reliable. Look back a hundred years ago or so and we used almost all natural materials; beeswax, mineral oil, turpentine, wood, marble, etc. Now we have great options for paint, glass, LED lights, insulation, electric motors, solar panels, etc.
Twenty years ago a UNIX workstation stood on the floor next to your desk and consumed hundreds of watts of power. Now, when you get a pair of AirPods Pro you get a 64 bit UNIX computer in each year with Gigabytes of memory that run for hours on a small battery.
To address Kevin’s topic, I’d say we need energy, intelligence and knowledge. People are no smarter than they were a thousand years ago, but now we have learned the basics of how things work.
I too am dismayed by the pessimistic world-view of the progressive side. There are lots of good things coming up, and they're happening because of present problems, not in spite of them. Fossil fuels suck for lots of reasons besides CO2 emissions, and getting rid of them will create a cleaner, quieter, healthier future for everyone. Coal is the worst fuel source ever - it ruins landscapes, kills miners, and poisons the water and air. Oil is cleaner, but if you walk down any busy street, you can't converse or think because of the noise, and can't breathe because of the fumes, especially diesel. That's all going to change, and good riddance.
Things are improving on the social side too. That's why the right screams so loudly - they know they're losing and so they're desperate. Trans rights are actually a thing, something I never would have expected even 10 years ago. Remember how they ranted about gay marriage only 20 years ago? That's now done. Women aren't just gaining ground - they dominate college student bodies, and the young professionals in medicine and law. My state just elected a lesbian governor, something inconceivable in the 20th century.
So of course the future is green, but it's bright, electric green, viridian. Bruce Sterling called this 20 years ago, and we should be paying attention.
Huge masses of opal found on Mars,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/01/07/nasa-rover-discovers-gemstone-on-mars/?sh=67a80ae02335
Dibs!
if we're able to overcome our own lizard brains and use them in tolerably fair and responsible ways
Not really lizard brains. More like the anthropoid brain. In A Primate's Memoir Robert Sapolsky writes (paraphrasing here) that baboons need only about 3 hours per day of foraging to satisfy their nutritional needs, leaving about 21 hours each day for sleep, sex, play and making each other miserable.
And that's how they overran the capitol two years ago.
Oh, SNAP!
"Abundant energy and intelligence are the only two things that progress requires."
"Energy and intelligence are necessary but not sufficient."
One of these things is not like the other. That said, I agree with the "not sufficient" sentiment. More specifically, the missing element is wisdom. Wisdom is neither energy nor intelligence. Wisdom is the narrow path between being open minded (liberal) and skeptical (conservative).
A person that is intelligent and unwise jumps to a conclusion and is then very good at defending that conclusion. A person that is intelligent and wise carefully examines the evidence while subjecting their own jumped-to conclusions to rigorous skepticism ... and then they draw a conclusion.
Sufficiently wise people are centered, not fence sitters. They just look like fence sitters to people on their left and right that are insufficiently wise.
It isn't about 'the unfairness of modern society', it's about the unfairness of the Dark Ages, the conservatives' ideal era they aspire to return us to.
"....life has gotten better by leaps and bounds for nearly everyone..."
Kevin - You know I respect your opinion more than almost any single public figure in this country. As an inveterate (post) modernist, I equally respect your strategic optimism. Very few get it the way you do.
On this one, however, I have to push back hard. I hear echos of Steven Pinker’s delusional, myopic focus on how the human has indeed advanced, without any real understanding of the cost of this ‘progress’ to the non-human world. It’s not just global warming. Humans are destroying the non-human world on every imaginable level, at a rate that far exceeds our ability to fully comprehend, never mind admit, unless you separate yourself from the human ecosystem and immerse in the collapsing non-human world.
It is everywhere and all around us. The undeniable increases in and benefits to human ontology are in perfect inverse correlation to the consumption and exploitation at every level of the resources of the non-human world. We are destroying the Earth, in every dimension, to gain increase for our species. That is the cost of our betterment. It is our Faustian bargain that cannot be renegotiated with this iteration of the human.
To think that we can engineer or technologize or empathize our way out of this box canyon is a gross misunderstanding of who and what the human really is as a species. This is the key - as…a…species. The evidence is clear, as clear as evidence, or any data, can be. The Earth is dying, or at least an Earth amenable to this version of the human, and we are killing it in order to make our lives better, or easier, or more comfortable, or convenient, or whatever narcissistic, self indulgent impulse drives us at any given point in time.
Read this, my friend. It says it better than I ever could:
https://nautil.us/the-great-forgetting-253223/
"Kevin - You know I respect your opinion more than almost any single public figure in this country." Me too.
"Humans are destroying the non-human world on every imaginable level, at a rate that far exceeds our ability to fully comprehend ..." Agree.
"To think that we can engineer or technologize or empathize our way out of this box canyon is a gross misunderstanding of who and what the human really is as a species." Agree.
On the other hand, to understand what the human really is as a species is a reason for optimism. Broadly accepted perceptions of ourselves are sufficiently or insufficiently accurate in relation to the current context. They just happen to be insufficiently accurate in the current context.
I happen to have a more positive outlook than Kevin. My bet is 80:20 in favor of our species. Maybe I'm wrong. But if anyone's reflexive response, me included, is to assume they're right, they'll look for evidence to defend their assumption and find it, which has nothing to do with whether they're right or wrong and everything to do with the fact that their mind is no longer open to the possibility that they might be wrong.
My reason for optimism has little to do with technology. It is in what would qualify in the current context as a sufficiently accurate understanding of who we really are as a species, in lieu of the various broadly accepted misunderstandings.