Call me a sucker but to me, Elon's takeover of Twitter is basically a reclamation of hardcore engineering mindset - it resonates with me as we do lack such places nowadays. Remove Elon from the equation and there wouldn't be that many cool projects pushing the technological frontier in the West. For instance, in the space domain, China would be launching way more mass payload to orbit if it wasn't for the SpaceX.
I am writing this post to continue the theme of our civilization operating well below our potential - with energy being the most pressing matter leading to tech tree energy starvation.
Sure, in theory we can build renewables which is basically a neologism for non-nuclear renewable energy sources. These suffer from low energy density, occupy a lot of land that could be reclaimed by wild nature.
But that's not the main point: we should not be constrained by the power of the sun - we should have so much energy to allow for element transmutation, with an anti-gravity drive in every home: extreme energy abundance is the goal, with a nuclear reactor in every house as a human right.
More seriously though, a lot of people have covered in great detail why nuclear energy has been a flop and whether there is a change it will come back.
However, these are mostly recent takes. Let's go back to the optimistic 1950s and the Great Man Freeman Dyson himself who new a thing or two about nuclear power.
In his book Disturbing The Universe book, he wrote:
“[…] In August 1955, while I was quietly working on spin waves in Berkeley, a mammoth international conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy was held in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations. This was a decisive moment in the development of nuclear energy. American and British and French and Canadian and Russian scientists, who had been building nuclear reactors in isolation and secrecy. were able for the first time to meet one another and discuss their work with considerable freedom. Masses of hitherto secret documents were presented openly to the conference, making available to scientists of all countries almost all the basic scientific facts about the fission of uranium and plutonium and a large fraction of the engineering information that was needed for the building of commercial reactors. A spirit of general euphoria prevailed. Innumerable speeches proclaimed the birth of a new era of international cooperation, the conversion of intellectual and material resources away from weapon building into the beneficent pursuit of peaceful nuclear power, and so on and so on. Some part of what was said in these speeches was true. The conference opened channels of communication between the technical communities in all countries, and the personal contacts which were established in 1955 have been successfully maintained ever since. To some small extent, the habit of openness in international discussions of peaceful nuclear technology has spread into the more delicate areas of weaponry and politics. The high hopes raised in Geneva in 1955 have not proved entirely illusory.
The technical preparations for the Geneva meeting were made by an international group of seventeen scientific secretaries. The scientific secretaries worked in New York for several months, driving hard bargains on behalf of their governments, making sure that each participating country would reveal a fair share of its secrets and receive a fair share of the limelight. They worked in obscurity and waded through vast quantities of paper. The success of the conference was entirely due to their efforts. One of the two Americans in the group of seventeen was Frederic de Hoffmann, a thirty -year-old physicist then employed as a nuclear expert by the Convair Division of the General Dynamics Corporation in San Diego, California.
As soon as the Geneva meeting was over, Freddy de Hoffmann decided the time had come to give the commercial development of nuclear energy a serious push. For the first time it would be possible to build reactors and sell them on the open market, free from the bureaucratic miseries of secrecy. He persuaded the top management of the General Dynamics Corporation to set up a new division called General Atomic, with himself as president. General Atomic began its life at the beginning of 1956 with no buildings, no equipment and Freddy rented a little red schoolhouse that had been abandoned as obsolete by the San Diego public school system. He proposed to move into the schoolhouse and begin designing reactors there in June.
Freddy had been at Los Alamos with Edward Teller in 1951 and had made some of the crucial calculations leading to the invention of the hydro gen bomb. He invited Teller to join him in the school house for the summer of 1956. Teller accepted with enthusiasm. He knew that he and Freddy could work well together, and he shared Freddy’s strong desire to get away from bombs for a while and do something constructive with nuclear energy.
Freddy also invited thirty or forty other people to spend the summer in the schoolhouse, most of them people who had been involved with nuclear energy in one way or another, as physicists, chemists or engineers. Robert Charpie, even younger than Freddy, had been the other American in the group of scientific secretaries of the Geneva meeting. Ted Taylor came directly from Los Alamos, where he had been the pioneer of a new art form, the design of small efficient bombs that could be squeeze d into tight spaces. For some reason, although I had never had anything to do with nuclear energy and was not even an American citizen, I was also on Freddy’s list. Probably this was a result of my encounter with Teller the previous summer. Freddy promised me a chance to work with Teller. I accepted the invitation gladly. I had no idea whether J would be successful as a reactor designer, but at least I would give it a try. For nineteen years I had been waiting for this opportunity to make Eddington ‘s dream come true.
Freddy de Hoffmann was my first encounter with the world of Big Business. I had never before met anybody with the authority to make decisions so quickly and with so little fuss. I found it remarkable that this authority was given to somebody so young. Freddy handled his power lightly. He was good-humored, and willing to listen and learn. He always seemed to have time to spare.
We assembled in June in the schoolhouse, and Freddy told us his plan of work. Every morning there would be three hours of lectures. The people who were already expert in some area of reactor technology would lecture and the others would learn. So, at the end of the summer, we would all be experts. Meanwhile we would spend the afternoons divided into working groups to invent new kinds of reactors. Our primary job was to find out whether there was any specific type of reactor that looked promising as a commercial venture for General Atomic to build and sell.
The lectures were excellent. They were especially good for me, coming into the reactor business from a position of total ignorance. But even the established experts learned a lot from each other. The physicists who knew everything that was to be known about the physics of reactors learned about the details of the chemistry and engineering. The chemists and engineers learned about the physics. Within a few weeks we were all able to understand each other’s problems. […]”
What strikes me is that the dynamism of these people as well as the leap of faith from management: think about it, who would put a 30-year-old guy in charge of building a new nuclear power plant division? Moreover, where else would you get such a concentration of talent?
Dyson continues:
[...] 'The fundamental problem of the nuclear power 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. It is inconceivable under present conditions that a group of enthusiasts could assemble in a schoolhouse and design, build, test, license and sell a reactor within three years. 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. Not only in private industry but also in the government laboratories, at Los Alamos, Livermore , Oak Ridge and Argonne, the groups of bright young people who used to build and invent and experiment with a great variety of reactors were disbanded . The accountants and manager s decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors. So the weird reactors disappeared and with them the chance of any radical improvement beyond our existing systems. We are left with a very small number of reactor types in operation, each of them frozen into a hug e bureaucratic organization that makes any substantial change impossible, each of them in various ways technically unsatisfactory, each of them less safe than many possible alternative designs which have been discarded. Nobody builds re actors for fun anymore. The spirit of the little red schoolhouse is dead. That, in my opinion, is what went wrong with nuclear power.'
Compare that to current zeitgeist of low-risk, how-constrained, scarcity mindset thinking - Claude Clement in his book on brain-computer interfaces writes:
Dreamers in nonmedical applications: their objectives are less noble than the other group described above. They want to use BCI technology for more trivial applications, like brain-to-brain communication, controlling machines or vehicles directly from the brain, merging artificial and natural intelligence, or augmentation of our capabilities. Famous wealthy entrepreneurs are investing enormous sums of money in this direction. They even hire crowds of neuroscientists to implement their dreams. The reasons why I qualify them as dreamers are:
– Neuroscientists are involved, but only a few experienced technologists carry a reality check.
– These groups usually ignore the natural limitations of the human body.
– The laws of physics are not fully understood, especially regarding energy and wave propagation.
– The surgical procedures to put these nonmedical devices in the head of people include high risks.
– Costs related to developing and manufacturing BCI systems are grossly underestimated.
– Even if the application is nonmedical, implants must follow safety regulations imposed by health authorities.
Are you ready to have a full craniotomy, with the associated serious clinical risks, have a long recovery time and visible scars, pay all the huge cost by yourself, and be able to drive your car directly from your brain? I’m not in favor of the initiatives of the dreamers. Even if the young successful entrepreneurs pay from their own pockets, they are taking valuable resources, especially scientists and engineers, away from the medical field. Is it acceptable to book an operation room, a surgical team, and hospital time for placing a nonmedical implant in the head of a person? No! Especially when medical resources are in high demand.
Where else have we prohibited engineers and technologists from having fun?
In what other fields have we become scared of the dual use of technology?
Maybe there are reasons to fear technology, but it is way scarier to live in the world of lack of technological progress and zero-sum games.
