According to Elon Musk the big project is man going to Mars. According to Donald Trump it’s Big AI. So, which do I think is the next Manhattan Project? Well, neither of those.
Mars will have to wait until there is a compelling reason to send men there. Sure, send some really advanced drones and bring home some Mars rocks (or Martians if you can find them). Heck, send a lander to Titan or Ganymede. I’m all for that. Even capture an asteroid made of gold and platinum and break off chunks and throw them into the desert or the ocean. All good clean fun. But that’s not the Manhattan Project.
And neither is AI. That’s just more of the same. That’s management reducing the payroll to a minimum. Sure, it’s a stunning tool that will enhance the ability of all kinds of projects. And it will make a lot of us redundant too. So, I don’t look at it as some big breakthrough for humanity. At least not as advertised at the moment. Maybe when we get the AI implants, I’ll change my mind.
No, the Manhattan Project for the 2030s is the changeover of the American power grid to nuclear plants. We have a window of opportunity while the current fossil fuel reserves are still relatively robust to begin systematically designing and optimizing fission plants to make them as close to foolproof as humanly possible. We have about fifty years to achieve this before we run out of fuel and based on how the French have been using them for about seventy years without a catastrophe I’m confident that within thirty years more than fifty percent of the American power capacity could be converted to fission plants. And after that it would be a short time until the only other plants would be hydroelectric and some exotics like solar panels in the desert.
Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel. A lot more work needs to be done on optimizing the life cycle of the radioactive materials in both the fuels and the wastes. Long term storage and recycling materials for reuse are still underdeveloped areas of study. Just dumping depleted fuel rods in an underground mine under a mountain in the Nevada desert is a pretty crude plan for the materials produced by the reactor. Often the byproducts of the reactor can be reclaimed and even transmuted into useful fissionable material.
But we are still in the infancy of nuclear technology. Combustion is almost as old as hominid life on the planet. Neanderthal possessed fire. Now we have to make the leap to domesticating the neutron. What’s needed is a push in the right direction. A pilot project sponsored by the federal government to design a plant that can be tested under the most disastrous set of circumstances imaginable and proven safe. This will provide the American public with the confidence that their bogeymen from the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl events are long dead and buried.
Right now, it wouldn’t have to be some trillion-dollar boondoggle. Use reasonable resources to build the test case. Tap into the existing designs and the recent innovations that are going on in China and India and then let the big brains at the big engineering firms show what they can do. Who knows, maybe Elon Musk could be convinced to put his Mars mission on hold to bring forward the future of human energy production. Surely, he would consider that a worthy project. And it would make his dopey electric cars a lot cheaper to charge.
“Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.” Interesting choice of words. If only there were a way of capturing all those extra neutrons and making fuel grade Uranium from more common ore. We could call it a “Breeder reactor”. Nah. It will probably be decades until we could do that. Like negative 7 decades. There is no scientific reason not to use nuclear power. As you pointed out, the French have been doing it for 70 years. (They sell power to Germany.) And if the French can do it…. The roadblocks are 90% political and… Read more »
Whatever we do with so-called “spent” fuel, we don’t want to make it unrecoverable. Just because we cannot do a lot with it doesn’t mean our grandchildren won’t be able to do so. No shooting it into the sun, putting it 4,000 feet down then sealing the access, etc. Instead of protecting future generations we’d be depriving them of a source of recoverable power.