The sciences help us understand what can be objectively known and the laws by which the universe operates. Artists help us interpret the unknown in ways that might be useful or interesting to us. Artists live right at the edge of order and chaos, interpreting the chaos and sometimes organizing it in such a way that order can be seen.
In this way, science fiction attempts to tell us our future. For example, in 1989, Back to the Future II predicted Donald Trump’s political ascendency in 2015. And many inventions have started with an artist’s conception expressed through the medium of science fiction. It is striking that pretty much all major works of science fiction seem to include nuclear power of some kind. I think nuclear power allows the artist to leapfrog past our present constraint of energy scarcity to conceptualize traveling long distances at or above light speed.
Science fiction gets many things right and wrong about the future. The most heartbreaking broken promise of science fiction was the lightsaber, I am still picking up the pieces of my broken heart from that one. But seriously, why is almost nothing in science fiction powered by coal, oil, or natural gas? I think it goes back to the best thing about nuclear power – it’s so much more energy dense and scalable than anything else.
Manu Saadia’s 2016 book Trekonomics describes how abundant energy and the “replicator,” a device that can synthesize almost anything, make Star Trek a post-scarcity world. While there are obvious contradictions and limits to this concept, I think it is so helpful for scientists and engineers to dream along these lines and see what might be possible. Let’s dream together for a minute about the things we can “replicate” with unlimited nuclear fission. Imagine nuclear power becomes “too cheap to meter” as Lewis Strauss dreamed in 1954. First, let us imagine how this might be possible…
- Most of the cost of nuclear power comes from the capital costs to build the power plant. What if we built power plants in such a way that they could run in perpetuity with limited maintenance? The difficulty in keeping nuclear plants running seems to be more political than technical, so the problem is solvable. We just have to keep building a long and trustworthy safety record, and we have to view past accidents in the context of their preventable (and perhaps predictable) causes.
- Much of the capital and operating costs of nuclear power plants are associated with regulatory burdens and insurance, which could be safely reduced as technology becomes more intrinsically safe.
- Although uranium fuel is cheaper than gas or coal, it could be made much cheaper still. By closing the fuel cycle and exploiting other fission sources besides uranium, we could make the fuel for nuclear power basically free.
- Nuclear power uses so little land. All the power for the U.S. could be generated in a footprint roughly the size of San Antonio, Texas. As we continue to scale the efficiency of nuclear technology, we can drive down land costs, which are a sizable part of capital costs.
Ok. So, let’s say nuclear power is almost too cheap to meter. What wonderful things could we do with it to benefit human health and the environment? Here are the things that come to mind for me:
- The end of water scarcity – we could use the cheap energy from nuclear power to desalinate ocean water and refill aquifers that have been depleted by over-withdrawal. In the same way, we could augment water-stressed rivers and lakes. We could use desalinated ocean water to restore natural habitat that has been impacted by human-induced water scarcity. Whole new regions could develop in the western U.S., unlocking virtually unlimited potential for land development and usage of deserts for more productive farming.
- Making environmental remediation extremely cheap – the cost of electricity is what sets boundaries on almost all forms of soil, sediment and groundwater remediation. For example, the operating and maintenance costs of pump-and-treat systems that use air stripping to remove volatile organic compounds from groundwater are driven by electric prices. Therefore, the lower the electricity price the more environmental remediation is economically feasible. The same goes for thermal desorption of contaminated soils and sediments, and many other remediation technologies, including geologic sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Extremely cheap power would allow people to clean up many of the sites that we contaminated as we blazed our sometimes-messy trail to material wealth.
- Eliminate landfills – By generating power without emitting carbon dioxide, and possibly using some of that power to sequester carbon dioxide, we could generate the conditions that would allow us to safely and carefully incinerate waste material without significantly impacting the environment. This would allow us to reclaim land that has been used for landfills and avoid making future landfills. The average landfill size is 600 acres, and we have 3,000 active and 10,000 closed landfills in the U.S. Based on the average landfill size, that could mean we have 8 million acres of landfills in the U.S., roughly equivalent to the footprint of the entire state of Maryland. This land could all be converted to a more valuable purpose if we were incinerating waste.
- Space travel – We could continue to develop lightweight, high-powered reactors that can lead us to interplanetary travel as well as settlements on the moon, Mars, and beyond.
- Better nutrition – agriculture is water and energy intensive. The production of chemical fertilizer began the end of human starvation, but many people around the world still suffer malnourishment. Cheap nuclear power could be used to pump (and treat) more water, power more agricultural equipment, and manufacture more cheap nitrogenous fertilizer from the air.
- Better education – nuclear power could support better artificial intelligence (AI). To assist with human-led instruction, each child could have a personalized AI tutor. The tutor could watch them work a complicated math problem with the optimized amount of prompting and correction. Or it could carry on conversations with them in a foreign language, prompting new words at an optimized rate and using carefully designed context clues to mimic the rapid linguistic advances of a child in their first language (think of ages 3 to 8 here to get a sense of how rapidly a child could achieve native fluency).
Many thoughtful people believe that wealth is basically energy, and the energy consumption of a society indicates its wealth. The availability of cheap power drives industry, and it drives down the prices of all products, from fertilizer to farm equipment. Viewed through this lens, the possibilities for human advancement are almost endless. Note that many of these ideas did not originate in my mind but were borrowed from others. What have I missed? Would you add any other dreams to my list?