(Why does he always have to talk so fast and hectic…)
No worries, there’s always In-Q-Tel.
A bit off topic, too:
While it is a stupid idea to close the GLO because it will do a lot of harm, just a few side notes on the glow-in-the-dark stuff…
... which seem to have turned into a lengthy rant.
The guys who are really pushing nuclear energy right now want it for bit barns, mostly for “AI”. They have enough money and don’t need government loans.
SMRs (and even fusion) already have backing, are partially owned by or are subsidiaries of the usual suspects mentioned above. Helion is backed by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, and if you care about the future of humanity, you don’t give people like Altman and Thiel even more money to play with.
The current proposals are unrealistic. Helion claims to be able to generate electricity from fusion by 2028. 'Nuff said. SMRs are still very much pie-in-the-sky as well. I’m not saying they can’t work, but I do say they’re probably not worth it. The concept has been around since the 1950ies. (“If we can put small nuclear power plants in subs and carriers, why can’t I have one in my basement?” Fine by me if that basement has an ocean handy as an emergency cooling and waste dilution system. And if you have the kind of security force that makes sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. And can pay the maintenance bills. And have the bit about safe long-term waste disposal worked out.) Anyway, there are studies that suggest molten salt SMRs will produce more waste than PWRs.
All things considered, nuclear isn’t commercially viable. Which has been more or less clear since the 1950ies, and that was before anybody had been giving any thoughts about the waste. The companies that build power plants, run power plants and sell electricity didn’t touch it until governments stepped in and promised to make it worth it for them. Otherwise, both R&D and insurance costs would have been simply prohibitive. Again, this is even before “how do we plan and pay for a disposal facility that needs to be there for thousands of years”. Governments picked up the bill at first because they wanted nuclear weapons and later because they wanted the prestige (“All the cool kids are doing it, mom!”). And maybe nuclear weapons later.
Nuclear energy is a dead end even medium-term. Electricity from fossile fuels at scale is less than 200 years old and, environmental concerns aside, may be viable for maybe 200 to 300 years more. Depending on energy consumption and how much oil and gas and coal can be scraped from increasingly difficult to reach fields. Switch everything to nuclear right now (theoretically) and we’re also looking at maybe 200 to 300 years. Because fissile material is, surprise, also a limited resource that is scooped out of the planet and (sort of) burned. Breeder reactors only push running out of fuel a bit further down the line, but don’t solve the problem. I would like to have people in, say 500 years have electricity, too.
Fusion may be viable one day and is definitely worth looking into, even if only for how much there is still to learn. As a power source at scale, cheap or not, it will be just around the corner for another couple of decades yet, no matter what Sam Altman says. The engineering and material science still has some catching up to do, it’s as simple as that.
There already is a decently sized fusion reactor we can tap into right now for power. It has been up and running for ~5 billion years now and is good for another ~5 billion years. It is right there, doesn’t need maintenance and doesn’t cost any money.
Regarding environmental concerns - looking at the money and even, more important, the time it would take to build nuclear power plants, big or small, a lot more can be done with renewables faster and cheaper. Which is why some people are against it. Yay, capitalism.
Not to say anything negative about your calculations, the next leap in human space flight (settlements on moons, planets, and space stations, going to other stars) isn’t really an engineering problem — it’s an agriculture problem.
People have to eat. A lot. Every day.
The rest of the universe, so far as we can tell, is not conducive to growing the food we need to live. Until we can solve the problem of feeding people long term off-planet with locally available resources, our next step is going to stall.
Typical intercontinental airliner altitude ~ 10km, or >1000x Wright brothers
Space station orbital altitude ~ 30x airliner altitude
Lunar distance ~ 1,000x space station altitude
Mars distance (nearest earth) ~ 200x moon distance
I was thinking of plotting this, or doing some kind of scattergraph combining required delta-V or number of persons who have reached these respective altitudes. But it’s Sunday morning and i’m being lazy.
Absolutely true and frequently underappreciated. Much as i enjoyed The Martian, “sciencing the shit out of it” with shit and potatoes ain’t gonna cut it. We currently are utterly unable to live on other orbs without a substantial umbilical cord back to Momma Gaia. Just not possible.
In the process of “sciencing the shit” out of his situation, he neglects to remove the perchlorates from the soil and dies quickly from toxic exposure around sol 60. - The Martian (Revised)
Yeah, the author did a decent job of getting a fair amount of the science right, or at least having it more accurate than a lot of other Sci-fi books, but the fact that Martin dirt is made of poison was a bit of a miss. I knew a physicist who was a huge fan of the book and challenged anyone to point out the science it got wrong. I immediately brought up the perchlorate issue and he just waived that off as a inconsequential technicality. And when I asked him why the lander and ascent rockets were piloted manually over remote control by a guy with a joystick, when no space rocket has ever been piloted that way (for good reason) he just got annoyed at my questions.
I still enjoyed the book, and appreciated some of the stuff that it did get right. But like all sci-fi, even the so-called “hard” sci-fi, you just can’t take it too seriously.
Yeah, exactly - and more generally a biology problem (e.g. keeping a human alive during a trip to Mars), which is squishy, ambiguous science that Elon and his fellow fascist would-be engineer bros don’t want to even think about.
Also Mars doesn’t even have dirt (in the sense of soil, which is what you need to grow plants). It has rocks broken down by mechanical action and non-biological chemical processes; “dirt” is the result of millions of years of activity by organisms. This is one of the things that people like Musk ignore - we need dirt to survive, and only Earth has any (at least in this solar system), and we don’t really know how to make it.
Antithesis: Leon is so full of shit that farming on Mars could actually work, on a small scale.
In keeping with the scientific method, we should stick him in a rocket and test this.
My recollection (I got less important things to do than look it up) is that he did not finish a degree (engineering nor otherwise), nor has he ever sat on the right side of a locomotive cab. Not an engineer by those 2 measures.
That’s actually one detail that I totally forgive the author for because he was very well aware of it when he wrote it, and freely admitted that the physics were off. I heard him in an interview and he said that he needed a premise to force the astronauts to evacuate and “wanted nature to get in the first punch” in this story. That was the best idea he could come up with to get the story rolling and I can’t fault him for it.
I liked that later in the book one of the big threats was a dust storm that was so widespread that it was barely noticeable but was still enough to gradually block out the solar panels. Bringing the threat to a more realistic yet mundane feeling phenomenon.
drivin’ that train/