E10: Energy for an Age of Miracles

0:09There's a quote I quite like from Alan Kay who's he ran Xerox PARK and he says the best way to predict the future is to invent it. and I do think that especially right now like this is such an exciting important time where the future could be one of we all have to consume a little bit less energy or we've kind of maxed out our per capita energy and we say okay now this is the amount that we're all allotted and let's just make it clean or it could be one where we say you know actually why are we content with like let's 10x that or 100x that and what does the world look like in those times and I think it's really up to.

0:46There's no future to be discovered. Like, it's not like we're going to, it's already been pre-written and we're going to figure it out. It's up to people to make it the future we want it to be, or at least try.

1:04What a perfect quote to kick off the last episode of this season of Age of Miracles. That was Matt Slotkin, the founder of Blue Energy, the company that plans to build nuclear reactors in shipyards, put them on boats, and float them to end markets around the world. The best way to predict the future, Matt said, is to invent it. That's a good way to summarize the point we've been trying to make this season. We can live in an age of miracles, but it's going to take a lot of work. Energy is kind of like the meta version of that idea. The world is in the middle of a transition to cleaner, more abundant sources of energy like nuclear, fusion, solar.

1:40And as we've covered throughout the season, it's incredibly hard to pull off. Of course, there are the technical aspects. Figuring out how to unlock the energy latent within atoms is one of humanity's greatest discoveries to date. But the discovery is just the starting point. Between innovation and impact, there is a gauntlet of opponents, regulators, construction challenges, financing costs, supply chain issues, public sentiment, and setbacks. On the other side, though, if we figure out how to overcome all of the hard things standing between us and widespread nuclear fission and fusion energy production, all of the other really hard things we want to pull off will become a whole lot easier.

2:19That's why we chose to do the first season of Age of Miracles on the energy sources of the future. In the first episode, we said that energy is at the root of prosperity and progress. And I believe that even more strongly after working on this season. If a genie gave me the ability to plant one idea deeply in the minds of everyone in the world, I might choose that one. Energy abundance is the most important thing we can work towards as a species. More than simply surviving climate change, we have the opportunity to unlock a new level of human thriving if we can successfully navigate this transition.

2:53Fortunately, the world seems to be waking up to this idea. On episode six, we mentioned rumors that the U.S. would lead an international coalition at the COP28 climate summit in committing to triple nuclear capacity around the world by 2050. A couple of weeks ago in Dubai, that happened. Nuclear wasn't even on the table at these summits a couple of years ago. And this year, it was the main event. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer recently put out a video saying that her state was working with private and public partners to reopen the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Generating Station. She said, going forward, nuclear energy will be a piece of our clean energy strategy.

3:32International agreements and pro-nuclear statements don't put gigawatts on the grid. The EIDER project is proof that even with the best intentions and biggest budgets, these projects can take a lot of time. But popular support is a prerequisite to production, and popular support is certainly shifting in nuclear's favor. Yeah, the momentum feels even stronger than it did in the beginning of the season just 10 weeks ago. But turning that popular support into power is going to require a sustained effort from thousands of people over the next decade and beyond. On the fission side of the world, utilities will need to order Westinghouse AP1000s, first one at a time, then five at a time, then ten at a time, and take advantage of the talent trained and lessons hard won at Vogel.

4:16Small modular reactor companies like Oklo and Newscale will need to deliver on the opportunities they've been given and that they've earned. And we'll need to see the developer model come to nuclear in force in order to make building reactors large and small more efficient. On the fusion side, private companies will need to prove that they can achieve Q greater than 1, and then prove that they can achieve a Q high enough that they can economically capture the energy released in the fusion reaction and then sell it to customers. Fusion is less impossible than it seemed a few years ago, but a lot still needs to go right.

4:50While we didn't cover all of the challenges that lie ahead, I actually think that you can learn a lot by perusing the YouTube comments of our Fusion episodes. I've been struck by how smart and thoughtful a lot of the conversation in there has been. We'll also be releasing bonus episodes featuring some of the full-length interviews that we've done this season, so keep an eye out for those. One thing that Fusion has on its side that Fusion doesn't is a cleaner regulatory framework. In this phase, when engineering is becoming as important as physics, the iteration speeds possible in fusion will be hugely important.

5:21Given the emphasis on building things, seeing what works, and tweaking that we've heard from companies like Helion and Zap Energy, it's hard to imagine that we'd achieve fusion in this century if it faced the same regulatory challenges that fission does. And while commercial fusion is going to be incredible when it arrives, and while we think it might arrive sooner than we expect, it is crucially important that the excitement over fusion doesn't drown out the growing excitement around fission. As one of the YouTube commenters, Chapter 4 Travels, said, there is nothing that fusion promises in some fantasy future that fission can't do today.

5:55The language is stronger than we'd go for, but it has some truth to it. Nuclear fission works today. It's clean, safe, the fuel is abundant. If the world had 10x more nuclear capacity, it would be in a much better place. On episode 5, we talked about paper reactors versus practical reactors. Currently, fusion generators are paper reactors, while fission reactors, the ones providing almost 20 % of the US's electricity operating in 28 different states, are practical reactors. They are actually producing power. Yeah, that's a really good point. Fusion will face challenges that will only become evident once companies achieve Q1 and start building real power plants.

6:35Fission has already faced every challenge in the book. There have been anti-nuclear movements, meltdowns, stringent regulation, construction delays, supply chain challenges, you name it, vision has faced it. But despite all of that, the technology works. We need to do everything in our power to bring more of it online now. Well, we spent a lot of time this season talking about all the challenges besides regulation. And while nuclear founders are hesitant to place the blame on regulators, I've come away more convinced that the biggest bottleneck to nuclear's development is regulation. Everything else, construction delays, expensive materials, high financing costs, would be improved by more sensible regulation that of course prioritizes safety, but thoughtfully weighs the costs and benefits of nuclear as opposed to simply minimizing the risk of any costs at all.

7:22The most surefire way to minimize the impact of nuclear waste or the risk of meltdowns is to make sure that no new nuclear gets built at all. And that's what the NRC has effectively accomplished. But that's also the most surefire way to ensure that people die from much more dangerous fossil fuels, that we continue to increase the temperature of the planet, that companies rely on foreign oil, and that we remain stuck in this current energy regime. Put bluntly, the benefits of nuclear far outweigh the costs, which have been overblown, and we are not taking climate change or energy abundance seriously until we make it easier to build new nuclear capacity.

7:55So what can you do about it? It's becoming less and less risky for politicians to support nuclear energy. I think the best thing listeners can do about it is to lean into that momentum and push their representatives to support nuclear. We need to generate the political will in this country to overhaul the way the NRC operates. That starts with ensuring that Part 53, which deals with the regulation of advanced reactors, enables the very innovation that can make reactors safer, gives clear guidance to companies who are innovating in nuclear, and gets enacted as soon as possible. But ideally, it would mean revamping the way the entire NRC regulates nuclear, from the smallest reactor to the largest.

8:33I like the A16Z American Dynamism partner David Ulovich's idea here. So I think if we talk about the future, I think government's role is if they want to change the composition of that pie or the size of that pie dramatically, they need to create incentives and they need to create motivations to do that. And I think that would be an incredible place for government to play a role. And they can do that in the form of legislation, in the form of funding. And I don't think it's just tax credits. They need to be more directed and more proactive. Like I said, like a nuclear version of the Chips Act, a changing to the way the DOE and the NRC operate by mandating a certain number of licenses be granted per year or that a certain number of new designs be granted per year or categories of designs.

9:18Instead of preventing nuclear, the government needs to view it as one of the most strategically important assets the country can produce and even export and mandate that the NRC issue licenses. We've talked a lot about whether capitalism or authoritarianism works best for nuclear, And I think the answer is capitalism unburdened by the practically authoritarian restrictions we've put on the category. So call your representatives. You can find their contact information at house.gov by using the Find Your Representative tool and entering your zip code. And tell them that you support nuclear energy.

9:50Or join a nuclear advocacy group. Some of my favorites are Mothers for Nuclear, Stand Up for Nuclear, Generation Atomic. Vote for pro-nuclear candidates. Turn the disparate trickles of nuclear support into a wave. Amen. I'm not a single-issue voter, but I really do think that energy is one of the very few categories that, if you get it right, can solve all sorts of other issues that we just spin our wheels on today. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about why I think the climate crisis is actually this kind of useful thing, in that it's a forcing function that will push us to unlock the next level of energy after fossil fuels.

10:26The important thing for humanity is having the ability to produce and consume much more energy without killing ourselves in the process, and that's exactly what vision and fusion promise. One of the things I realized writing that piece that I hadn't before is that humanity is only as ethical as it can afford to be. The US and Britain abolished slavery after the Industrial Revolution made it economical to replace human labor with machine labor for a number of jobs. I think there's something more broadly true there. I wrote, When food was scarce, it was acceptable to kill neighboring tribes to take their food.

10:57When machine labor was scarce, it was acceptable to enslave other human beings and force them to labor. Today, we allow billions of people to live in energy poverty because fossil fuels are a scarce resource. Around the world, children still do homework by candlelight once the electricity goes off for the day. Think of all of the human flourishing capped by a lack of energy. In the future, if we look back on our farming and eating animals as barbaric, It will be because we've learned to convert energy into food as delicious and nutritious as meat. We may look back on the fact that people were forced to spend most of their waking hours working jobs they hated in order to provide food and shelter for their families as horribly unethical once we can afford to.

11:35We will certainly look back on energy poverty as unethical. One of the main reasons we progress in the game of energy is in order to afford to become more ethical. If we figure out energy, we get all sorts of other good things practically for free. We can talk all we want about how energy-dense nuclear is or how clean or how safe it is. Throughout the season, we've thrown statistics and specifics at you to make the case that we need to produce more nuclear energy and fusion once it arrives. But energy for Westerners is like water for fish. It's just there. This is Paki's analogy, and I absolutely love it.

12:09We are David Foster Wallace's fish. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, morning boys, how's the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit. And then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, what the hell is water? We flip the switch and electricity just comes pouring out. We need to drive somewhere. We fill up our tanks and hit the road. The best possible outcome for energy is that you never have to think about it because it just works and it doesn't limit anything you want to do.

12:42So to end this season of Age of Miracles, we wanted to leave you with specific visions of what the world looks like when we have abundant energy. Thanks for listening so far. Hang on, we'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors. At the beginning of each interview, we asked people, what does the pie chart of energy sources look like in the US in the year 2050? We shared some of their answers in episode seven, when we covered all the other energy sources that people are excited about besides nuclear. And we want all of them. Nuclear fission, fusion, solar, geothermal, hydro, and yes, even wind.

13:16At the end of each interview, we asked every guest a different question. What does the world look like when we have abundant energy? The answers highlight why getting this transition right is so important, how more energy will have a real impact on people's everyday lives, and why we chose to do the first season of Age of Miracles on nuclear and fusion energy. So we're going to let you hear our brilliant guests' specific visions of our abundant energy futures straight from them, starting with Josh Wolfe at Lux Capital. If you ask me the single most important word or concept to understand, it's entropy.

13:47And the way you fight entropy, the natural trend towards disorder and thermodynamics, the second law, is by putting energy into a system. It's true of our human body. It's true of our relationships between each other in a metaphorical sense. It's true of companies that need lifeblood of capital, whether generated by internal operations or fundraising. It's true of society writ large. It's true of your room. You know, if you don't constantly clean it, these things trend towards disorder. And the way you stop disorder and create structure is by putting energy into systems. Abundant energy would reduce entropy and create progress.

14:23And it's just like, to me, that is, when you see these old visions of the future, like even if you played SimCity back in the day, it was nuclear reactors. They had the little atomic thing that was, you know, So with the monorails and the flying cars, it wasn't like coal and so like, yeah, there were some solar cells maybe in the little thing before Godzilla came and, you know, stepped on everything. But elemental energy, nuclear power, I think gives you that. So if you have abundant energy, then you have desalinated water, you know, water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. We have abundant water, but there's so much salt in 98 % of it.

14:52And so if you could desalinate water, the way you do that, whether it's reverse osmosis, it's very energy intensive, but if you have cheap energy and it's abundant energy, now you've got abundant water. Well, now if you have abundant water, you can irrigate all kinds of places that don't have arable land. And so Arizona spends so much money, Southern California, so much money on watering their gardens and pools. But then you've got agriculture and you've got healthy food. And you can spread that to the world. So that to me is the virtue that you would have abundant energy, abundant water, abundant food.

15:21And then you can see that if that's a clean source of electricity, let there be a million electric cars, whether they're, you know, Elon's robo-taxis or they're Audi or BMW or Porsche or Toyota or Honda or whoever, GM and Ford, we will have electric cars. We will have far less roadways and people will have less parking spots. There will be more green inside of cities. I think cities just generally are getting more and more green for a variety of different reasons. And then manufacturing becomes a playpen for people with abundant energy to tinker and experiment. Transportation costs decline. You know, it's a beautiful world and it's elemental.

15:58Clean water, green spaces. And here's Terraform Industries' Casey Hanmer. More energy is better, particularly carbon-free energy or carbon-neutral energy. This is how we extend the sort of wealth that you and I enjoy to 8 billion, 10 billion people plus their friendly AIs. This is how we kind of finally put most of human needs below the API. But one particular case that I think is interesting for expansion of hydrocarbon consumption is aviation. So right now, aviation consumes something like 2 % of the global hydrocarbon supply, which itself is roughly$7 trillion per year industry. So it's just a huge, like just since we've been talking, the global oil and gas industry has turned over a billion dollars.

16:33Think about that. But there's this mindset that says in order to solve the carbon emission problem from aviation, we're going to have to compel a carbon tax to pay for offsets, which are kind of rubbishy anyway. It's not really controversial for me to say that. And also increase the price of flying to make it more exclusive. So like screw poor people, You get to go nowhere or go someplace slowly. You get to spend your limited hours, the amount of hours you've got left before you die. You have to spend sitting in some shitty slow bus or train going someplace. And it's for your own good. I just think that I don't like that mentality at all.

17:03I think that we should be like, oh yeah, we figured out how to make synthetic fuel. And by the way, it's like 10 % denser than kerosene, so your planes can fly further. And it's also like half the price. So now, instead of 10 million people routinely flying planes, it's like 100 million people routinely flying planes. And because it's so much cheaper, we can get back on the supersonic transport bandwagon again, which kind of, you know, Concorde fizzled out because gasoline got expensive, kerosene got expensive. So I just think it's a super exciting future if you're like, well, actually, you know, gasoline is now fairly durably a buck per gallon anywhere on earth.

17:28Maybe it's a little bit cheaper in the equatorial areas, which is like, again, nice for them. And, uh, you know, 10 million people, you and I who fly planes routinely, we get to fly supersonically. So I can go to Australia in four hours instead of 12 or 14. And then, you know, another a hundred million people, billion people can fly planes around the world to education, work, meet their loved ones, just have a better and cooler life. And then obviously we can spend a fair bit of fuel flying people to other planets as well, but that's actually a drop in the ocean. The number of people you'd have to fly to other planets to even make a dent in global hydrocarbon usage is a staggeringly high number.

17:56I hope it comes true, but it'll be a while yet, that's for sure. This is what I mean by saying that solving energy makes all sorts of other problems easier. If we figure out energy, we can figure out supersonic flying again. We can go to Japan to get sushi. And here's Angelica, who was one of my favorite interviews throughout the season. She was such a good sport. We asked her to support wind and she ended up supporting nuclear and telling us what the world looks like if we get that right. And it's straight out of sci-fi. Well, you know, there are Star Wars people and Star Trek people. And I'm very much a Star Trek person.

18:29And when you watch the Star Trek, especially the next generation, what you see is a society that has transcended the material squabbles. They've gone post-scarcity, post-economics, and there's still an infinite amount of exploration to be done, lives to be lived, art to be created. But they're not constrained by their next meal. They're not constrained by these pressures that stop them from living life to the fullest. I think about how right now in the world, there's all these people who are living lives that are so much more constrained than my own. In third world countries where they might not be able to study or the girls might not be able to reach their full potential because they're tied to the drudgery of having to wash laundry by hand.

19:29And the easiest metric to determine whether or not they have these good lives is power usage. And you see that the poorest countries use so little power compared to the rest of us. And I've just come back from the Philippines, a country with enormous potential and a very, very skilled and desirable workforce. We know that because Filipinos go all over the world to work because they don't have opportunities in their home country. And while there are many factors for why that is the case, one big one is the Philippines as an acaipelical nation doesn't have a stable grid. And power is not just expensive, it's unreliable.

20:13The potential of that country can never be fulfilled without cheap, stable electricity. And I believe that's also broadly true all over the world. The rich world needs nuclear energy to decarbonize, and the poor world needs abundant, affordable nuclear energy in order to thrive. and right now nuclear energy is low carbon but it's not cheap and abundant yet but we know that that's not a physical impossibility we just need to find a way to get over our fears and engineer a way to make it so and i believe in our human ability to do that next here's alex epstein the author of fossil future if you love energy you should just be really excited by what can we do if there's way more of it?

21:02So if we had that where it was so cost effective that energy use ended up multiplying by 10, I mean, just let's think of a few things. One is just that everyone could actually be prosperous. And I've said, I think that the life of the average person around the world, if most of us got put in their position, we would consider it to be the apocalypse. We go without power for a few days and we just think, oh my gosh, the world is over. And that's a normal thing. I mean, it's just, it's even hard to talk about just what it's like if you really think concretely about what it's like not to have reliable electricity.

21:35Talk a bit in my books about just what it's like to not have incubators and you have a premature child and just like that child dies. And in the United States, it's like, you don't even think about it much later. And yet it's a permanent tragedy for millions of people and this is happening all the time. So life could be, it could just continue progressing and billions and billions of people would have better lives. And I think that's better for everyone, but it's certainly better for them. So one is just you can actually have people rise out of poverty. Another one is medical care, medical care and longevity.

22:09A lot of what we have now in terms of medical care and longevity is based on having really cost effective energy, in part because we just have all these amazing machines that use a lot of energy and that take a lot of energy to produce. So the cheaper those get, the better. a huge aspect is now as we have, let's say, I don't like artificial intelligence, but augmented intelligence with machines, we have a potentially unlimited amount of compute desirability to discover new things about health. And so it'd be great if you just had five times more energy at your disposal. If there was something really, really difficult to figure out, you can just totally invest that.

22:46And more broadly, you can just invest infinitely in knowledge or in being aided in gathering knowledge. That in a sense is going to be every field, but just medicine in particular, I think about because I'm, what am I, 43 right now, and I'm definitely going to die at some point. I'm not one of these people who thinks I'm going to live forever, but it'd be great to extend that by 10 or 20 years. And it'd be great to be healthier during that. One of my sentimental favorites is macro climate mastery. The higher ability you have to neutralize climate dangers and harness climate benefits, the less relevant it is what your particular climate is doing.

23:23And this is why in the United States, we can all have a life expectancy around 80, despite the fact that we have polar Alaska, swampy Florida, we have Texas, we have all these crazy climates. And we're totally good in all of them because we have a high level of mastery. But if you look at our mastery, one is, of course, we want that to spread around the world and be cheaper and stuff. And right now, I mean, poor people around the world, even in the wealthy world, have real trouble air conditioning their homes have real trouble heating their homes in the winter. These are still existential problems for people.