According to Elon Musk the big project is man going to Mars.\u00a0 According to Donald Trump it\u2019s Big AI.\u00a0 So, which do I think is the next Manhattan Project?\u00a0 Well, neither of those.<\/p>\n
Mars will have to wait until there is a compelling reason to send men there.\u00a0 Sure, send some really advanced drones and bring home some Mars rocks (or Martians if you can find them).\u00a0 Heck, send a lander to Titan or Ganymede.\u00a0 I\u2019m all for that.\u00a0 Even capture an asteroid made of gold and platinum and break off chunks and throw them into the desert or the ocean.\u00a0 All good clean fun.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not the Manhattan Project.<\/p>\n
And neither is AI.\u00a0 That\u2019s just more of the same.\u00a0 That\u2019s management reducing the payroll to a minimum.\u00a0 Sure, it\u2019s a stunning tool that will enhance the ability of all kinds of projects.\u00a0 And it will make a lot of us redundant too.\u00a0 So, I don\u2019t look at it as some big breakthrough for humanity.\u00a0 At least not as advertised at the moment.\u00a0 Maybe when we get the AI implants, I\u2019ll change my mind.<\/p>\n
No, the Manhattan Project for the 2030s is the changeover of the American power grid to nuclear plants.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019m confident that within thirty years more than fifty percent of the American power capacity could be converted to fission plants.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.\u00a0 A lot more work needs to be done on optimizing the life cycle of the radioactive materials in both the fuels and the wastes.\u00a0 Long term storage and recycling materials for reuse are still underdeveloped areas of study.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Often the byproducts of the reactor can be reclaimed and even transmuted into useful fissionable material.<\/p>\n
But we are still in the infancy of nuclear technology.\u00a0 Combustion is almost as old as hominid life on the planet.\u00a0 Neanderthal possessed fire.\u00a0 Now we have to make the leap to domesticating the neutron.\u00a0 What\u2019s needed is a push in the right direction.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Right now, it wouldn\u2019t have to be some trillion-dollar boondoggle.\u00a0 Use reasonable resources to build the test case.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Who knows, maybe Elon Musk could be convinced to put his Mars mission on hold to bring forward the future of human energy production.\u00a0 Surely, he would consider that a worthy project.\u00a0 And it would make his dopey electric cars a lot cheaper to charge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to Elon Musk the big project is man going to Mars.\u00a0 According to Donald Trump it\u2019s Big AI.\u00a0 So, which do I think is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3545],"tags":[3370,3372,120],"class_list":["post-32005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-science","tag-energy-policy","tag-energy-research","tag-nuclear-power"],"yoast_head":"\n