Tucker's Terrestrialism and the Technology of Modernity (Jon Boone)

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Tucker's Terrestrialism and the Technology of Modernity

By Jon Boone -- January 24, 2012 “The release of energy from splitting a uranium atom turns out to be 2 million times greater than breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond in coal, oil or wood. Compared to all the forms of energy ever employed by humanity, nuclear power is off the scale. Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal, and coal half the density of octane. Altogether they differ by a factor of about 50. Nuclear has 2 million times the energy density of gasoline. It is hard to fathom this in light of our previous experience. Yet our energy future largely depends on grasping the significance of this differential. “ – William Tucker, excerpted from his lecture, Understanding E=MC2 William Tucker has powerfully explained how the future of technologically advanced civilizations depends upon a sophisticated ability to convert the highest energy densities into increasingly denser power performance, and in the process compacting the time and space necessary to do productive work.

In fact, Tucker wrote an excellent book about this, Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Energy Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey. In light of the excerpt from that book recently posted at Master Resource, I thought readers of this forum might find my review from two years ago (see below) of interest, particularly if they have not yet read Tucker’s book.

The Primacy of Energy Density Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel has demonstrated that the trend in energy usage continues along a decarbonizing trajectory. Improvements in technology combined with a communal desire to live longer and more healthfully have spurred this phenomenon.

Given a choice, who wants to live in a town where thousands of chimneys cast off carbon by-products like sulfuric smoke and soot? Civilization will continue decarbonizing apace, whether this aligns with climate change alarmism, or not.

Connected to Ausubel’s idea is Vaclav Smil’s credible proposition that there is a fundamental societal chain reaction cascade involved with discovering energy densities, Page 1

which then produce greater power densities, each generation of which leads to even greater energy/power densities, in ways similar to that described by Moore’s Law. For the last 150 years, we have briskly moved beyond wood and wind, fire and horses to harness the energy within the electro-magnetic force that, among other things, generates electricity, which development continues and will become crucially important as science hones in on advancing the potential of nanotechnologies and the capacity of quantum computing, making our digital world seem quaint.

But to really get at energy densities that will empower planetary and interplanetary work, which is what the future will demand, we’ll require the energy of the greatest force we know, the strong nuclear force, the one that binds together the nucleus of atoms.

Of course, this initiative is well on its way, beginning with Einstein and Bohr more than a hundred years ago, continuing through the Manhattan Project, and made manifest contemporaneously by many nuclear power stations for the production of electricity, here and abroad. But… Prometheus Bound There are those who think nuclear power, with its vast density, is far too dangerous for the likes of mortals to use responsibly, similar to how the Greek gods felt about giving humanity fire. This has resulted in tightly bounding the Prometheus of nuclear technology in chains of such onerous regulation that the cost of the technology, in time and dollars, has, de facto, become prohibitive. It has also produced a quavering political atmosphere in the US that prompted President Jimmy Carter to outlaw the reprocessing of nuclear waste material, leading both to large stockpiles of the stuff that would otherwise not exist and recurrent political finger pointing about where and how to store it.

The nuclear industry does itself no favors when it nonsensically insists, for reasons of cupidity and political correctness, that renewables like wind are respectable players in the energy marketplace. For this idea gives succor to those who so dislike nuclear they would substitute wind for it, as is now the case with Angela Merkel’s Germany—a palpably bizarre outcome, where the German Colossus now seeks to be powered by the mythic giants of Spain’s greatest work of fiction, at a conservative cost of trillions of euros.

Recent events have only added to nuclear’s woes. New techniques for extracting Marcellus shale deposits have substantially reduced the cost of natural gas, leading to prices as low as $3 MMBtu. Many economists believe such a price leaves nuclear uncompetitive as a baseload source of power for electricity—despite having a national capacity factor approaching 95%.

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Fukushima And then there’s the Fukushima debacle. Although there are many who think the Fukushima nuclear event was a grand success story for the technology, because…

—Despite enduring one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, eventuating in one of the worst tsunamis ever to hit Japan; despite decades of administrative dimwittery by Japanese nuclear bureaucrats; despite efforts by melodramatic media reports and fear mongering politicians; despite loopy projections from a medical journal that tied over 14,000 U.S. deaths to the Fukushima reactor (talk about bad science)—the Japanese Government, after screening over 160,000 people in the general population through March 2011 for radiation exposure, found no cases that affected overall health. None.

Virtually all the nearly 16,000 confirmed Japanese deaths were caused by the earthquake and tsunami. The Fukushima plant itself was antiquated and in need of upgrades—but no one wanted to spend the money. Still, radiation levels from the incident may prove not at all deleterious for people who were evacuated from the affected region and who wish to return.

U.S. Nuclear Here in the U.S., the nation’s largest electricity grid, the PJM, has used nuclear power for nearly 40 percent of its electricity for many decades, without incident, or even much threat of incident. The US Navy’s nuclear fleet is the envy of the world.

Nonetheless, a climate of fear and new extraction techniques for energy densities appropriate for most contemporary power demand, leading to cheaper competitive fuels, will keep nuclear advances at bay for a time, at least in large parts of the West and certainly in the US. This situation won’t last. At the time I wrote my review of Tucker’s book, natural gas was relatively expensive, for a variety of reasons, some of it even related to the market. Shale gas is a game changer today. Nonetheless, in the longer term, I don’t think it will appreciably modify the ultimate lure of nuclear, given its vast energy density, so many times greater than oil.

Moreover, it’s unclear how long natural gas prices will remain at these present low levels. And it’s uncertain how long the supply will last. Perhaps another generation or so. Perhaps another century. It will eventually be depleted.

The mining of energy density is what produces greater power density machines, as was the case for coal, gas, and oil. This tandem will cascade very rapidly in the future, creating new expectations for power that can only be met by increasingly higher power density machines, which can only be fueled by increasingly higher density energies, etc.

As Tucker explains, the highest energy densities are found in an atomic nucleus via the strong force. Solar derivatives like fossil fuels and hydro will likely continue to provide Page 3

the bulk of our power density needs for several generations to come. However, although the energy densities here complement the energy densities from various chemical reactions (rockets to the moon, for example), they still pale beside those of the strong force.

Breakthroughs for safer deployment of nuclear power will not be long in coming, though, whether they’ll be in the form of enhanced thorium reactors, which would do away with uranium or plutonium, or smaller, modular “micro” nuclear plants delivering about a third of the installed capacity of current units working at scale. There are already many designs for improved fast breeder reactors. Tucker provides a sampling of the possibilities. Both China and India remain committed to a nuclear future and continue to invest in research and development that may soon lead to safer fission processes.

Conclusion If past is prologue, what the world of the future will want is greater prosperity enabled by the highest power densities. To obtain that prosperity, culture will fabricate responsive and increasingly interactive machines powered by high-energy concentrates.

Sooner than later, technology will cross a threshold of expectations that only nuclear power can meet, accelerating at warp speed the ability to do more work in less time in smaller spaces. More power means greater productivity.

Which means more clothing, food, and shelter for the entire world. It also means future Mona Lisas created by people now mired in bone-crushing poverty, as well as the exploration for Martian water. And more time to sip new blends of lunar coffees while discussing Zeno’s Paradox.

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