|
Holiday Greetings
Looking Ahead
Whatever one’s political persuasion, it’s clear that there are going to be major changes as the result of November’s election. Since our focus here at SCGI is on energy, I’d like to share a few thoughts on that topic and what we might expect.
The choice of Chris Wright as the incoming Secretary of Energy has drawn predictable opprobrium from environmental groups and many in the press. He’s been characterized as a “climate denier” and is, in fact, “a fracking guy.” Yet the glut of natural gas we have in the USA due to fracking is the main driver of the reduction of coal use in domestic electricity generation, and it’s far more feasible to capture all the CO2 from electricity generation from gas-fired power plants than coal or oil.
When considering the role of Chris Wright to head up the Energy Department, it can be instructive to read a document published by his company, Liberty Energy, called Bettering Human Lives. In his introduction, he argues the following point:
Climate change is a real global challenge we should and can address. However, representing it as the most urgent threat to humanity today displaces concerns about more pressing threats of malnutrition, access to clean water, air pollution, endemic diseases, and human rights, among others.
In that document and in several of his talks that I watched online, Wright consistently argues that supplying abundant and affordable energy to everyone is a matter of social justice, a principle that we here at SCGI have repeatedly made in arguing for energy egalitarianism. He contends that running modern civilization on “renewables” (mainly wind and solar) is a pipe dream, but he’s enthusiastic about nuclear power. He’s on the board of directors of Oklo, a prominent nuclear startup that’s in the process of developing fast-neutron small modular reactors. Both Oklo and Bill Gates’ Terrapower are well on the way to building this type of reactor system that SCGI has been hoping to see since our inception.
The incoming administration will likely drastically reduce the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Inflation Reduction Act earmarked for renewable energy subsidies and tax credits. Given the abject failure of Germany’s Energiewende, the mountain of data from that policy fiasco should be an object lesson that spending vast sums on renewables is a fool’s errand. If the IRA’s renewables subsidies are pared back and even a small portion of that money is directed at encouraging nuclear power development (with many promising designs in the pipeline), then real progress could be made, with global implications.
The story of human energy use has consistently progressed from lesser to greater energy density. Only in the past few decades have people tried to harness some of the least energy-dense sources, like sunlight and wind, at great expense. On the other hand, the ability to harness nuclear fission brought the whole energy density factor into another realm entirely. Whereas the transition from wood burning to coal burning roughly doubled the energy available, fission increases energy availability by millions of times, especially if fast reactors are used.
Consider this: Fast-neutron reactors like Terrapower and Oklo can burn depleted uranium as fuel. The USA alone has roughly a million tons of depleted uranium, already out of the ground, that is essentially free. Compare the electricity that could be generated by that free uranium inventory to an equivalent amount of electricity generated by coal-fired power plants. That depleted uranium would produce as much as if you had four parallel sets of railroad tracks, with four unbroken trains of coal-carrying train cars stretching from the earth to the sun.
Earlier this year, I was invited to the Department of Energy in Washington to discuss a proposal I’d written up to provide fuel for Terrapower’s Natrium reactor project in Wyoming. That project’s planned 2028 startup date had been moved back to 2030 or later because the plan had been to obtain the fuel it needs from Russia. After the Ukraine invasion, that plan was no longer feasible. SCGI’s proposal was to utilize old nuclear weapons material to fabricate the fuel for Terrapower, a simple and well-proven technology that would be both inexpensive and quick to accomplish, allowing the project to return to its original schedule. A similar swords-into-plowshares concept had already been used since the fall of the USSR, using decommissioned Soviet nuclear warheads to produce about 10% of the electricity produced in the United States through the “Megatons to Megawatts” program.
Alas, two such visits to the DOE failed to move the needle. While the top nuclear people at DOE were very receptive, it quickly became clear that internal DOE politics prevented any progress. Might Chris Wright change that political dynamic and allow progress on that front? I’m hoping that will be the case, and I’m attempting to set up a briefing to discuss this and other nuclear issues with him before the new administration takes over.
SCGI has been involved with nuclear power plants and nuclear fuel projects since our founding. The Thorcon project promises to rapidly produce safe nuclear power plants with global deployment made possible by ship-borne reactors. The Thorcon team has been working on the finer points of their system (e.g., graphite and salt specifics) and expects that by the end of 2025, they’ll have the final design completed and ready to build. They also look to be on track to have the funding available by that time, and then the first full-scale test reactor could be completed the following year. You can read more about the amazing potential of this system here.
If Thorcon and/or other promising companies succeed in rapidly producing nuclear reactors, then fuel supply could become an issue. Already this has been the case since the start of the war in Ukraine since Russia was supplying a hefty proportion of the world’s nuclear fuel. Now, countries are scrambling to bring a nuclear fuel supply chain online to avoid dependence on Russia. SCGI has been cognizant of fuel supply issues, looking at the possibility of uranium enrichment using lasers instead of centrifuges. We had talks with France’s nuclear power organization, AREVA, about 15 years ago to discuss a collaboration on this technology.
Though those talks foundered on AREVA’s concerns about export restrictions, the people involved with us at that time finally succeeded in funding a company to pursue the project. The new company, Laser Isotope Separation Technologies (LIST), has a world-class team of experts poised to demonstrate a fuel enrichment system that would make even the most advanced centrifuge enrichment systems obsolete. The next year or two will tell the tale, and if the system is as successful as we expect it to be, scaling up to high production levels will be straightforward and rapid.
So, as we look forward to the next year, we can expect real progress on the energy front. Hopefully, the new administration will enable real progress toward eliminating global energy poverty by promoting nuclear power development. Even if their focus is less on climate change and more on utilizing fossil fuels and nuclear power rather than renewables, the acceleration of nuclear power development and deployment will itself do more for ultimately addressing climate change challenges than the continual funneling of untold billions into wind and solar projects. Let’s look at the situation as a glass half-full and do our best to make progress toward energy social justice.
We’d like to thank all of you who follow our activities and progress, especially those whose generous contributions allow us to continue our work. May you have a happy holiday season and a new year that brings us closer to energy abundance for all.
Tom Blees
President, SCGI
If you agree that fission energy is a necessary part of our energy future, please support our continued efforts with a donation. Click here to donate.
|
The Science Council for Global Initiatives is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization. All contributions are tax-deductible.