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I- The Historical Increase in the Amount of Energy Available
This is a continuation of my last post, where I examined different explanations for the way a bunch of things all seemed to simultaneously go off the rails in 1971. In simpler terms in the last post I attempted to answer, as the eponymous website asks, WTF happened in 1971? But I left one explanation out. I saved my favorite for this post. But before we can get to that I need to go much farther back, all the way to 1650.
It was in about 1650, a century before the Industrial Revolution, that the United States (or what would become the United States) started growing and from then until (almost) now it grew at a steady average of 2.9% per year. Despite the passage of decades and centuries this growth was basically constant. Though recently there are signs that it’s started to slow. (Average growth since 2001 has only been 1.7%, 2% if we don’t include last year.) After hearing this one is immediately prompted to ask: What was the long term average growth rate before 1650? Or in any case before the industrial revolution? As it turns out it was all but zero, perhaps a long term average of 0.1%? Based on this one might just as reasonably ask, WTF happened in 1650?
It was presumably a combination of a lot of things. The mother country was at the tail end of 300 years of fighting the black death with the associated drop in population. (The last great outbreak, the Great Plague of London, ended in 1666.) Such plagues, while being vast, unimaginable tragedies, also end up being great for innovation. Additionally, the U.S. is a vast continent, full of resources, and in 1650 it had been emptied by its own set of plagues, the black death being only one of many. And then of course there was the scientific revolution, which got the ball rolling on all of the inventions that would come to define the later industrial revolution.
This last element was what really made the difference. There had been temporary surges in growth before. Rome experienced one every time they conquered a new territory. But the scientific revolution changed a short-term surge into a long term trend. Growth that continued decade after decade and year after year as the scientific revolution gave way to the industrial revolution. When people think of the industrial revolution they picture the associated inventions: the cotton gin, the telegraph and most of all the steam engine. And while these inventions were all important, what really enabled the ongoing growth was the additional energy our improved ingenuity allowed us to extract. First in the form of coal and then in the form of oil.
In other words, lot’s of things may have gotten the growth going, but it was the extraction and use of millions of years worth of accumulated energy in the space of a few centuries, that really kept it going. The engine of growth has always been energy, and the big difference between the pre-1650 0.1% growth and the post-1650 2.9% growth was the amount of energy available. And between 1650 and 1950 or 1971 (depending on how you slice it) economic growth and the amount of energy available went up at basically the same rate. In some respects this connection is almost tautological. If you want to make more stuff you need more energy to do it. Economic growth implies a similar growth in the amount of available energy.
To be fair, having more energy isn’t the only way to increase economic output. You could become more efficient in using the energy you already have. You could also increase output by increasing the number of people — though in essence this is just another form of energy, just not in the way we normally think of it.
II- The Henry Adams Curve
These three things, growth in population, efficiency and the amount of energy being produced in turn created the 2.9% economic growth we’ve been experiencing since the mid 1600s. By predictable I mean that we can fit it to a curve, in this case it’s the “Henry Adams Curve”, a concept introduced in Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall (which I reviewed here, and also reference here and here). From the book:
Henry Adams, scion of the house of the two eponymous presidents, wrote in his autobiography about a century ago: “The coal-output of the world, speaking roughly, doubled every ten years between 1840 and 1900, in the form of utilized power…”
In other words, we have a had a very long term trend in history going back at least to the Newcomen and Savery engines of 300 years ago, a steady trend of about 7% per year growth in usable energy available to our civilization. Let us call it the “Henry Adams Curve.” The optimism and constant improvement of life in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries can quite readily be seen as predicated on it. To a first approximation, it can be factored into a 3% population growth rate, a 2% energy efficiency growth rate and a 2% growth in the actual energy consumed per capita.
Here is the Henry Adams Curve, the centuries-long historical trend, as the smooth red line. Since the scale is power per capita, this is only the 2% component. The blue curve is the actual energy use in the US, which up to the 70s matched the trend quite well. But then energy consumption flatlined.
The 1970s were famously the time of the OPEC oil embargo and the “energy crisis.” But major shortages preceded the embargo by a year or two. They were caused by Nixon’s energy price controls, instituted in 1971. The embargo wasn’t until 1973. [emphasis mine]
III- What Happened in 1971? Energy Decoupled from Growth
In 1971 (or thereabouts) energy decoupled from economic growth. Okay, fair enough, but a lot of other things also happened in 1971. Why is this a better explanation than the end of Bretton Woods, or the peak of American power? Why do I think this is the true disease rather than just another symptom? Why is it my favorite explanation?
First off, one of the points I brought up in the last post was the lack of data for so many of the phenomena that were being highlighted. Half of the graphs didn’t go back farther than World War II, making it impossible to know if 1971 was the beginning of something exceptional or a return to normality. But this is a trend that has been going on since before America was even a country. Making this change, potentially, far more consequential. This isn’t a reversion to the 1920s, as was the case with inequality, this is completely new territory: Modern technology without the associated growth in energy which made the world modern in the first place.
This gets us to the second reason I prefer this explanation. It illustrates the fact that this is completely uncharted territory. Modern society is built on the idea that the amount of energy available on a per capita basis will just keep growing. Perhaps you’ve seen the meme where there’s a picture of the Wright Brothers on one side and on the other side is a picture of Neil Armstrong, and the caption points out that only 66 years separate the Wright Brothers first flight from the moon landing. I don’t know about you, but that fact blows my mind. It’s also the perfect illustration of what it looks like for the amount of available energy to grow at a compounding rate. In the mid-1900s we had been experiencing this sort of growth in available energy for centuries, and in those years, when science fiction was at its height, it’s vision of the future was based on it continuing. Which is how they arrived at the idea of flying cars, moon bases and manned missions to Jupiter. But in 1971, shortly after the moon landing, per capita energy flatlined.
One of the biggest revelations to come out of Flying Car, for me at least, was the fact that had growth in energy continued at the pre-1971 rate we would have had flying cars and moon bases and probably much else besides. The science fiction writers would have been right. The reason they were wrong had nothing to do with their understanding the dangers, difficulties and desires of and for flying cars. They were wrong because they didn’t foresee that the growth in energy which had so dominated the previous two hundred and fifty years, going all the way back to Newcomen’s steam engine at least, was only a few years away from coming to an abrupt end.
It’s now been 52 years since that legendary first walk on the moon and 50 since 1971. Not quite the 66 years between that and the Wright Brothers flight, but getting pretty close. Can we point to any comparable achievement? And does anyone imagine that waiting an additional 14 years will change that?
Despite all of the foregoing, the economy is still growing even if it’s doing so in a slightly slower fashion than it was for most of the country’s history (2% vs. 2.9% as mentioned previously). What does it mean for the economy to grow without a corresponding growth in the amount of energy? What does it mean to increase output in a way that doesn’t require any energy? What does that output look like? These questions take us to my third reason for preferring this explanation: energyless output is a credible cause for most of the things people have been complaining about.
But before we get to that it is necessary to make sure we’re not barking up the wrong tree. There were three components to the curve, growth in available energy, growth in population and gains in efficiency. Before we focus on that first one we need to make sure it’s not one of the other two. As I pointed out in a recent book review, it’s definitely not growth in population. The US population is only growing at 0.3%. But might we be using the same amount of energy more efficiently?
The math here gets a little complicated, but if we keep it simple, energy output and efficiency were both growing at 2% a year. If energy output stops growing then for efficiency to “take over”, for there not to be an increase in the amount of “energy-less output”, efficiency would have had to double from 2% to 4%. I have not come across anything that leads me to believe this is what happened, nor does it seem very plausible for something like that to suddenly double. Though given the timing — the 1970s was the first big energy crisis, and we’ve been emphasizing efficiency since then — it wouldn’t surprise me to find that it went from 2% to 2.5% or something like that. But it seems very implausible for it to have suddenly doubled, and if you look at the graph,energy per capita hasn’t just flatlined it’s gone down, so efficiency would really have to more than double, at the same time that the other factor, population growth, was also flatlining.
If you’re with me this far and you agree that there has been an increase in the amount of economic output that doesn’t require any energy, or at least far less energy, what would that look like? For me this whole process was put into stark relief in the process of writing my last newsletter. In particular this fact:
During the Trump Presidency the national debt increased by nearly $8.3 trillion dollars. This is enough money, in today’s dollars, to refight World War II twice over.
Here we can clearly see the difference between productivity which is tightly coupled to energy use, and productivity that is not. During World War II the money we spent went into ships and planes and tanks, and the salaries of the 16 million people in the armed forces plus all of the people working on the home front. I would imagine that World War II is as efficient as we’ve ever been at turning “energy” into “stuff”. But at the time of the Trump Presidency when he was increasing the debt by twice the cost of World War II, most of our economy had nothing to do with stuff. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. In 2007-2008 you had Wall Street investors moving around billions of dollars which had no connection to anything tangible. And as early as the 80s, the finances of Wall Street were only tenuously connected to tangible outputs, as illustrated by books like Liar’s Poker and movies like Wall Street. In more general terms the financial sector is growing to be an ever larger slice of GDP (output) but requires very little in the way of energy. And beyond that a huge slice of the economy has moved on to the internet. Which suffers from much the same problem of disconnecting the economy from energy.
One of my readers pointed out that you probably couldn’t literally compare the $8.3 trillion increase in the national debt under Trump with the money spent fighting World War II. That you needed to do more than just adjust for inflation, you also had to account for the mass mobilization factor and the other extraordinary circumstances associated with World War II. I’m sure that he has a point. If nothing else, a peacetime economy is very different from a total war economy. But even so the difference is stark. We’re not talking about the same amount of money, we’re talking about twice the money, so even if a peacetime economy is only half as efficient we still should be able to point to some accomplishment as impressive as beating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, instead it was swallowed without much to show for.
As one example, look at employment. At the start of the pandemic there 6 million people unemployed, within two months that had surged to 23 million. So an additional 17 million, which is very close to the 16 million under arms during World War II to say nothing of all the civilian workers essentially being paid by the government. Back then we were able to use the money we spent to pay them for years plus provide them with everything necessary to fight a war. Today there’s still 10 million people unemployed and of the 13 million who re-entered the workforce very few were directly employed by the government. In fact if anything the consensus seems to be that government money is keeping people from seeking employment. Meanwhile the stock market has nearly doubled from it’s pandemic low-point. A lot of money has gone into financial instruments and very little into stuff. Near the beginning of the pandemic Marc Andreessen, the famous venture capitalist, made this same point in his much shared post, It’s Time to Build. But building is precisely what you’re not doing if your economy has become disentangled from energy usage.
IV- Nuclear Power
In the past I’ve mentioned the idea of a religion of progress, an almost mystical belief that progress will continue essentially forever — that humanity is on a permanent upward trajectory. Some people believe this is happening with morality, and offer up the ongoing decline of bigotry and racism as evidence of its continuing impact. Or as Dr. King put it, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Some people believe that this is happening with technology, that scientific innovations have lifted people out of poverty, cured diseases and otherwise improved the lot of man. That if we just get out of the way human ingenuity will lead us to the promised land. Some people believe that both things are happening. Beyond the division between moral progress and technological progress, a further division can be made between those who have a primarily humanist interpretation of this progress, and those who think the process is primarily spiritual. With people like Steven Pinker on the first side of the divide and new age spiritualists on the other side.
I don’t fall into either camp, at least not in any recognizable fashion. But reading about what happened with nuclear power almost changed my mind. Here we are, it’s the early 70s, OPEC has just imposed a petroleum embargo. Things in general are not going well in the Middle East (and will continue not going well down to the present day). Fracking, and the vast supplies of domestic oil and gas it will make available, is still 30 years in the future. We didn’t know it at the time but energy production per capita has already started to stagnate. But it’s at this exact moment, when it seems that we’ve run out of road, when it looks like progress has been derailed, that nuclear power is finally ready for prime time. The way that just as one door has closed that another one opens is almost mystical.
But it was also at this moment, that for the first time since 1650, we hesitated. We had no problems moving from wood to coal, and from coal to oil, but when it came time to make the transition from oil to nuclear we dropped the baton. And nuclear power, which had been getting continually cheaper, suddenly started getting more expensive. The universe had provided us with the next step in the long march of progress and we refused to take it.
As we get near the end of things, I want to make it clear that I’m not claiming that the world fundamentally changed precisely in 1971. (I fundamentally changed in 1971, but the world didn’t.) But I do think things are different now than they have been. That the 52 years since the moon landing have been very different than the 52 years preceding it. And that the primary (though certainly not the only) cause of this difference was the stagnation in per capita energy availability.
V- Final Thoughts
Many years ago one of my close friends (we had been roommates in college) died because his liver failed. The question was why did it fail? The doctor’s decided it was alcoholic hepatitis, but I had my doubts. Yes my friend did drink, but I didn’t think he was that heavy of a drinker. But what he did do, more than anybody I’ve known, is take lortab. For those unfamiliar with lortab it’s a pain reliever which is a combination of hydrocodone (an opioid) and acetaminophen. I don’t think the alcohol destroyed his liver, I think it was the acetaminophen. As I was preparing to wrap up I was reminded of this story. We’ve identified the underlying disease, the available energy has stopped going up, but just like with me and my friends doctors, we may not agree on the behavior that’s causing the disease.
Alcohol is generally considered to be a bad thing, while medicine is generally considered to be a good thing, so it was easy for the doctors to blame the former rather than the latter, regardless of what was actually at fault. And as we move from identifying our malady to identifying behavior causing that malady I think we need to be careful to consider all possibilities. Even things we thought were beneficial. And here I am reminded of my newsletter from April. I would argue that this disease stems from the entirely understandable desire to maximize safety.
Clearly in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s understandable that people would be biased against a form of power that used the same mechanism as that used by the bombs. From this an understandable caution developed, but eventually some caution became an abundance of caution which became a super abundance. The chief example of this being the linear no-threshold doctrine of radiation, which holds that there is no safe level of radiation. That in tandem with trying to achieve perfect safety we decided to designate radiation as being perfectly dangerous. That zero is the only safe amount.
But it turns out that, just like with my friend, it’s actually the medicine that’s killing us, because once this ideology is widespread it’s only natural that the cost of nuclear power would go up, and as the cost rises it becomes even more difficult to take this next step. Accordingly, the amount of available energy stagnated. And economic growth without a corresponding growth in energy is a strange thing — we have yet to appreciate all of the consequences.
In pointing out the fact that available energy stopped growing, I am not going beyond that to claim that it’s a bad thing. In fact, in another post I pointed out that it was inevitable. Further, I am not convinced that if we had smoothly switched to nuclear we would now be living in a technological utopia. I am sure it would be a very different world, but I’m not sure it would be any better. And as available energy usage had to plateau eventually this is a transition that was coming one way or the other, but just because the transition was inevitable doesn’t mean it’s easy. This is in fact a massive shift from how things have worked for centuries — a shift that hasn’t received nearly enough attention.
Obviously this is a complicated problem, not only is there the disease itself, there’s also the matter of the behavior that got us there: our overwhelming timidity. Things are changing in ways we don’t understand and we’re not prepared for. We’re in a world that’s superficially similar to the one we’ve had since 1650, but under the surface it’s vastly different. Perhaps the best answer to “WTF happened in 1971?” Is that we entered uncharted territory, and it’s going to take all of our skill and wisdom, and yes, our courage as well, to avoid catastrophe.
One of my readers thought that I spent too much time on my own connection to 1971 in the last post. But clearly blogging is inherently a narcissistic activity, so I’m not sure what they expected. Going beyond that to ask for money to engage in this activity may be the most narcissistic thing of all. And yet, here I am, once again asking you to consider donating.
So would it not be a potentially helpful thing to somehow couple one unit of money with one unit of energy? I don’t know how Exactly one should do this but this idea swarmed around in my head for a long time now…
Sorry it took me so long to approve your comment, normally I get an email. It’s interesting you should bring up coupling one unit of energy with one unit of money. First off I had a note to talk about bitcoin which sort of does that, but I never got around to it. But I admit that I had never considered an energy standard similar to a gold standard. But as you say, how exactly that would work is not clear, but it’s definitely an intriguing concept.
Given the recent crash of Bitcoin seems directly connected to China both having outages in areas with lots of Bitcoin miners and clamping down on ‘energy intensive companies’, it seems like Bitcoin actually might be a stablecoin that represents units of electricity.
If that is the case AND it is also the case that each unit of GDP will require less electricity in the future, then the price of Bitcoin is going to go up.
Hmm, I think there’s a myth that we ‘dropped the ball on nuclear power’ out of concern for safety. This sort of thing sounds right because when we (since we are both of the same age, though you are older) were young it was common to see movies where the nuclear power plant was either the directly or indirectly the villain in some thrillers. But those making decisions back then were older and movies of the week didn’t have the same impact on them as it would on children.
There’s lots of technologies that people assumed would be larger than they turned out to be. Consider there are something like only 14 blimps in the world. There was a time when ‘airships’ were going to roam the planet. The Empire State Building was envisioned to be a port for airships to dock (it never worked, winds were too high to safely get them to connect) making it an airport in the center of a city.
Nuclear power sputtered out because the problem it was meant to solve stopped being a problem. Mass increase in electric demand stopped happening and electric rates stopped going up or sometimes even fell. A multi-billion dollar plant that would be funded by 30 year bonds and paid off with ever increasing electric prices became a bad deal when the problem became more like how do you deal with a temporary 10% increase in demand that only lasts a day….GE gas turbine plant for 1/100th the cost that can switch on and off much faster than a mega reactor.
Here I think is the problem with your thesis. It wasn’t energy availability that stopped, it was demand. If energy demand was there, then less energy availability would mean higher prices and yes a lot more nuclear plants would have been built. We stopped demanding energy with our economic growth. Literally we got an extra $100 and while we used to spend that on things that were 99% energy and 1% non-energy, we started spending it on things that just takes less energy to make.
And this I think is unavoidable. I mean we only have five senses. You can only ‘buy’ sensations to feed those 5 senses a finite amount of input per unit of time. It takes energy to make food. It is within the scope of many Americans to eat food every hour of the day. Americans have started eating more food than they used to, getting fatter. Yet no one wants to eat every moment of the day and even if they did, well we’re not far from that point and once that point is hit we can’t eat more food which means we can’t pay farmers to use energy to make more food. Give every farmer a nuclear reactor powered flying tractor if you want, that’s not going to increase food consumption.
Just consider this vision of the future from the past:
https://imgur.com/eROC0r9
Could we make this today? Sure. Does anyone want it? No. But we may want to see a movie of a world where stuff like this came to pass. We won’t spend our money to have a giant car with a wood working shop inside it, but we’ll spend our money on writers and a director to make a movie which shows us such a world (mostly using CGI!).
This is not just a generational myth. Plenty of younger scientists I know also think that we dropped the ball on nuclear because too many people thought it was scary.
Blimps were outcompeted by airplanes, which are much faster and better at dealing with wind. If you did a graph of airborne passengers vs time, you wouldn’t see it stagnate right when blimps were abandoned.
Natural gas production in the US peaked in about 1970 and was falling or flat until fracking took off in 2005. Saying that nuclear was outcompeted by natural gas is anachronistic.
Nuclear is only good for the baseline power supply and has trouble dealing with variable power demand. This makes it hard to produce 100% of our electricity by nuclear. However, we could use it for all of our baseline power, which is about 70% of our electricity.
The huge plants built in the 60’s and 70’s were very expensive and bespoke plants. The newer idea is for smaller plants that will be standardized so they can be mass produced, that, however, is a relatively new idea. A large bespoke plant not only feels scary, it is scary for multiple reasons. Financial is a big one. Gas plants are cheap to produce and have the benefit of working great either with baseline or surge demand.
Big nuclear is also scary from a safety POV. This has less to do with the amount of radiation a person will be exposed too when everything is normal but the potential to leave areas of the earth uninhabitable for the rest of human history if things blow up.
Fukushima is not ok today and the question of how many people might have indirectly died from evacuation is academic. The land is radioactive and if the population lived there ever since the meltdown going about business oblivious, we’d see a lot of deaths. If people lived around Chernobyl, the same thing would also happen. Yes there’s a lot of nature that has reclaimed the land, but mutations and cancers are high there among the nature. Squirrels and wolves can’t collect data and raise a ruckus when they discover they are living in a massive cancer cluster.
People knew even in the 1920’s that planes were faster than airships. The issue with wind was/is probably something that can be dealt with if there was motivation to push into that area.
“The land is radioactive and if the population lived there ever since the meltdown going about business oblivious, we’d see a lot of deaths.”
Source? Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived longer? Which has also been documented in places with higher ambient radiation (see fourth paragraph in this section):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#Areas_with_high_natural_background_radiation
I recall that you didn’t agree with me, but I went to great lengths on why that might be here:
https://wearenotsaved.com/2019/03/23/low-doses-of-harm/
How much material was released in the two small atomic bomings that were not consumed by the reaction itself or dispersed into the air? Fukushima was tons of material and the explosions that released them had nowhere near the energy to send any of it up high into the stratosphere.
In terms of source, I recommend NetFlix’s Dark Tourist ep. 2 where he goes on a tour of the ‘ghost town’. The place is still radioactive. Be honest, watch the show and tell me would you live there? Like actually live there not just take a 2 hour tour of it? Would your wife feel comfortable carrying a pregnancy to term there?
“The place is still radioactive” So? That statement is meaningless without knowing how radioactive. Every place is radioactive, we absorb background radiation all the time, moreso when we fly. Perhaps I didn’t tell this story when I reviewed Where Is My Flying Car, but at one point they transported a barrel of some low-level radioactive waste, and it had a leak. According to the law they had to get rid of it, so they dug this narrow trench out of the concrete that was like half a mile long and filled it in with asphalt only to discover that asphalt is naturally more radioactive than the substance they had leaked.
According to this article the area around Fukushima has a background radiation of 20 mSv a year. Ramsar in Iran, where there’s actually speculation (see wikipedia article linked above) that the radiation may be beneficial has a background radiation of 250 mSv a year.
https://www.worldnomads.com/travel-safety/eastern-asia/japan/how-dangerous-is-the-radiation-in-japan
So yes, in answer to your question I would happily live there. Whether my wife would be comfortable is a different thing, but if she wasn’t it wouldn’t be because she was being rational, it would be because (IMHO) she was being irrational.
In thinking about this. I happen to have a Tesla 3, because I’m very cool. On my phone is an app and inside that app is a section called ‘upgrades’. Upgrades has only had one thing now for the last two years. “Acceleration boost: Improved 0-60 mph time, 4.2s to 3.7s” $2000
Now in 1971 you might pay $2,000 more for a car with faster acceleration (or, I guess modify a car). Doing so would require some energy. It takes more energy per unit to set up and run an assembly line for a smaller set of cars, even if the actual physical parts of the cars themselves were not necessarily more energy intensive.
Today if I pay Tesla the $2K, they will download an update to my car and ‘unlock’ the acceleration. If I sell the car to a new owner, the upgrade will be stripped and he will have to pay Tesla $2K as well. The same code will be sold over and over again by Tesla for basically no energy consumption other than to run the servers on the cloud to keep track of the code and send it over the Internet.
Clearly this is not tied to energy availability. If a fleet of nuclear reactors drop electric costs dramatically, Tesla is not going to switch to multiple production line runs to have mechanically boosted acceleration. Tesla will pocket $2K over and over again for literally making nothing physical and US GDP will have lots of $2K’s in it from non-physical production. Even if energy costs were a lot lower, how much stuff could you possibly make to counter that? If you’re selling hotdogs @ $2/you need to cook 1,000 to match one Tesla sale. Even if you had a fast robot cook and free utilities, Tesla is literally making its money without even pushing a button.
I did say the shift was to virtual production but maybe the better answer is code unlocks a lot of production that is disconnected from energy use. Even in the world of physical products, code allows you to bypass energy to make production. In 1971 Tesla would do a dedicated small production run for the smaller number of customers who wanted to pay more for speed. Today it does one and just sells the code.
Caught this illustration this morning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/technology/computer-energy-use-study.html
“In their analysis, the two authors cite information from two large international network operators, Telefónica and Cogent, which have reported data traffic and energy use for the Covid year of 2020. Telefónica handled a 45 percent jump in data through its network with no increase in energy use. Cogent’s electricity use fell 21 percent even as data traffic increased 38 percent.”
So increase output by nearly 50%, and you get no additional energy use. If energy was a lot cheaper, the networks wouldn’t use more energy just for the sake of using energy.
Now imagine we needed to suddenly have 45% more new jeeps, say because there’s a war. There’s no way that wouldn’t draw a huge amount of energy, you’d have to run factories 24-7 (if they aren’t already running at that pace) and probably build new factories very fast.
But it gets worse. If people increased their data 45%, that means they are sending more emails, doing more zoom meetings, watching more Netflix. When you’re watching Netflix, you can’t be driving around. There’s only 24 hours in a day and 4 more hours of Netflix means 4 less hours of possibly consuming things that need a lot of energy. The flying car would be collecting dust in the garage.
We are in a world where production has decoupled from energy and it’s not going back, even if energy gets infinite and nearly free.
I agree that this is the most probable explanation for WTF happened in 1971.
France didn’t drop the ball on nuclear, but still seems to be similar to the rest of the developed world. It might just be that France has other problems (it never really industrialized, extra bureaucracy).
I do think that fusion is plausible in the next 14 years and would be of comparable significance to the moon landing.
You raise an interesting point. France lives like the rest of us. They didn’t take their larger than average use of nuclear and move the population into flying cars. Many people are unaware of how much they spend on electric. My electrician was having a garage sale on Sunday and I started chatting with him on solar panels. He proudly super insulated his house himself, his electric bill he thinks doesn’t even break $1,000 for a full year. He won’t do panels because he sees no point in making his roof look ugly. Electricity is no so cheap that it is not worth metering but for many people it is essentially free in their mental space. Yet their capacity to increase consumption by increasing energy demand is pretty blunted.
As far as France it looks like a new reactor hasn’t come online since 1999, and it was plateauing as early as 1990:
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx
Given how long plants take to construct I’d be surprised if the real change in attitude didn’t happen in the mid-80s.
So they’re not exactly an example of what Storrs had in mind. He was envisioning unlimited energy combined with American inventiveness. Not Gallic contrariness combined with vague environmentalism bureaucracy and and cold war politics.
That does seem like a reasonable explanation for France. They replaced most of their existing electricity generation with nuclear, but did not try to increase beyond that.
France has been pretty consistent with about 70% electric generated by nuclear power. The outlets in France work the same as they do everywhere else. If a French person buys a second TV, he will plug it in and it will work. If the people of France wanted more electric use, all they could just as easily buy stuff made from the US, Japan or China and the pull from their grid would have been higher and they could have either built more nuclear or added US style coal and gas plants. It’s not like the French are non-electric style people, they call Paris the city of lights after all. Flying cars would dodge traffic jams just as well in Paris (and hey the French didn’t invent cars either but they drive them).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/462535/nuclear-share-electricity-generated-france-since-1985/
If its human nature to keep increasing energy demand per person, the French would do it too. They might make you use a funny outlet with holes that seem silly, but they’d do it.
Our model would not be someone with a lot of nuclear power. It would be someone who has no fear of nuclear power, and takes advantage of that to build cheaper reactors than other countries. Given that they haven’t built a new reactor in probably 25 years, I don’t think France counts.
But why would you want to build a reactor? Why would you want to build a coal plant? Those things are byproducts of your desire to plug stuff in (TV’s, dishwashers, Playstations, bitcoin mining rigs, etc.). The only people who want to build nuclear reactors for the sake of nuclear reactors are nuke fanboys on the Internet. Outside that you build to meet your demand.
The question then is why has demand not increased? People clearly have more money now than in 1971. There clearly is nothing stopping them from buying more stuff to plug into their homes if they want too. They aren’t, they would rather buy a virtual skin on a video game than buy a 2nd Playstation. They’d rather add more streaming channels than another TV. Even when they do add a new TV, it’s likely taking less power than the previous ones!
You’re correct, the real question is “why has demand not increased?” Which I think I touched on, and offered up “Fear” as one possible explanation. Lack of ambition might also play a role. Perhaps we can place it in the bucket of generalized decadence. In no case are these good things, are answers which should provide comfort rather than provoking alarm.
Do you have some alternative answer which should provide comfort? Have we perhaps reached some sort of utopia? Have all our energy related problems been solved?
“You’re correct, the real question is “why has demand not increased?” Which I think I touched on, and offered up “Fear” as one possible explanation. Lack of ambition might also play a role. Perhaps we can place it in the bucket of generalized decadence.”
But this seems really odd. Two years ago on Thanksgiving I said what the hell and did Black Friday for the first time ever. At midnight I went to Best Buy and brought 3 TV’s. I figured I have my nephew and his gf here, why not get a good TV for my room, the living room and one for their room. A week later was watching something on HBO and they are on the sofa watching something on their phone. Grrrrr.
Am I afraid the increased energy of buying yet more TV’s will cause them to build nuclear plants that I’m irrationally fearful of? No.
It seems really odd to say my lack of desire to buy yet more TVs is a ‘lack of ambitition’ or ‘decadence’. I know Ross Douthat uses a specialized definition of decadence, but let’s be real. I could blow my paycheck every two weeks at Best Buy and you wouldn’t think I was ambitious or countering decadence but the opposite. It is simply consuming energy has diminishing marginal utility. Make everyone rich enough, and energy growth will start going down.
I’ll have to review the episode again to get the measurements but there’s two issues with radiation, and I think you only confronted one:
1. The immediate dose. This is where questions like should you worry about higher background radiation…or if it is ok to get an x-ray every year come into play. Are tiny doses just tiny harmful or might they have no harm at all or even some benefit?
2. Radioactive material. This is the dust that has spread all over places where reactors exploded as well as some nuclear test sites like the Bikinii atoll. At any given moment, the amount of radiation given off is pretty small. You could legitimately say if you’re going there for a day to shoot a documentary it’s no different than getting an x-ray at the dentist. However when you spend a lot of time there you will start ingesting that powder and dust and it will line your lungs and other parts of your body slowly giving off their energy for the rest of your life. You’re outside of #1 territory now and in #2.
Nuclear bombs more or may not leave this problem. If they are exploded in the air, their materials are almost all dispersed into the air and quickly spread around the globe diluting to almost nothing. On the ground you don’t get that dispersion from the bomb itself. On top of that the surge in neutrons goes into other material and dirt. That dirt will slowly release the neutrons they asorbed making the ‘fallout’ radioactive for varying periods of time.
The bombs used on Japan were weak and detonated somewhat high in the air. Some of the massive H-Bomb tests were done on the ground and were much more powerful. Hence you can visit some bomb sites and find no radiation at all above normal levels while other ones still show signs elevated radiation.
I think the issue with nuclear is essentially what it was in the game SimCity, as long as the plant doesn’t explode, you don’t have much problem. If it does, you have no-go areas forever. Plants that don’t explode, therefore, are the innovation nuclear needs rather than the 70’s solution lots of complex safety systems with an assurance they will make sure the plant never explodes. The current idea of a smaller plant that can’t explode no matter how stupid people get is better, although that makes it less efficient.
My understanding is that nuclear bombs are far worse for #2 than any of the nuclear accidents we’ve had, but that even then it mostly comes to the creation of radioactive iodine, that other radioactive material isn’t that big of a deal. But if you have some additional data i’d be happy to consider it.
From https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/radioactive-fallout.html , strontium 90 or cesium 137 seems to be the most problematic stuff from the bomb itself that will last a long time after the explosion. The height of the explosion is critical. Higher up and it will basically get spread around the world and irrelevant if you’re only talking about a single explosion. On the ground, though, you have some of the material from the bomb that will fall to the ground in one place and be concentrated there as a hot spot, you also get neutron flux which basically is a lot of neutrons that will go into normally non-radioactive material like rock, dirt, concrete, metal and make them radioactive. Give it a few days to a week, though, and that will go away (this was the idea behind the neutron bomb, set it off over, say, an enemy tank group and the soldiers will die of the radiation even if the tanks protection them from the blast, few days later your own troops could move through the area without worrying too much).
I suspect the Japanese bombs benefited from an air burst and being low powered bombs hence you do not see radiation there today while you still do in places like the Soviet H-bomb sites and Bikinii. Air bursts destroy a larger area so if you’re destroying cities, you get more bang for your bomb with a high up explosion. Many of the huge h-bomb tests, though, were done on the ground or even slightly buried.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster does say the estimates are 400 times more radioactive material was released in Chernobyl than by the two Japanese atomic bombings. This makes intuitive sense. You obviously can load an atomic bomb on a plane, I don’t think any normal plane could have taken the Chernobyl ractor.
About 40-60% of the radioactive iodine and caesium-137 was released. They don’t give how much the total weight was but we know the ‘elaphants foot’ that remains is about two tons by itself and is still radioactive but has gone down enough that a person can stand next to it for a while without getting a 50% lethality dose.
It’s not just nuclear reactors, medical imaging equipment has radioactive material in it and people are concerned terrorists could divert junked machines to make a dirty bomb that would containmate a few city blocks. I think the precautionary principle holds that nuclear power should be restricted to reactor designs that cannot blow up on their own rather than designs that can blow up but are surrounded with numerous complex systems that we are ‘assured’ will either prevent or contain any blowups. That would still leave us with a risk of a reactor getting blown up by an external attack but hopefully that could be managed with smaller reactors that would be less tempting a target and even if they are, the cleanup is more manageable.
Sort of related. Geothermal energy potential is huge https://twitter.com/elidourado/status/1412399332926578690?s=21