Pranav

Too cheap to meter

4 min read

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  • “too cheap to meter” - uttered by louis straus - atomic energy commission 1954

  • the richness / prosperity of a country can be measured by the amount of energy it consumes

Companies mentioned

J Storrs Hall - Where is my flying car book

james watt - defined the horse power as a weak horse after a week of work

primary production is important - Casey Handmer

oil → plastic

standard oil company -

  • spent a lot on R & D to convert sour crude to usable oil
  • sweet crude
  • sour crude - high sulphur

solar is a solid state technology

well under 10$ for Megawatt

60% of energy is spent getting to the energy where it’s required - base power co-funder grid is becoming a two-way street battery storage is the unlock for energy transition most grids are used 50% load

fissile isotope - able to split when bombarded with thermal neutron nuclear energy was born off of manhattan project

5 year between first atom split and the first nuclear reactor

20% of all electric power was nuclear at the beginning (not sure of the time period)

1942 - chicago pile - henricho fermi graphite bricks for shielding - extan -first gas reactor chicago pile → extan - 1.5 years

1979 - nuclear came to screeching halt - three mile island - 2 water pumps got shutdown 13 facilities studied any negative affects - found no affect outside of the fence of the island

nuclear regulation has significantly increased

“atoms for peace” → current state

cancellation of 200 nuclear plants in 1978

chernobyl & fukushima

even when congress said no license is required for atomic energy buildout - the atomic energy department mandated that everyone should require a license to build out plants

SMRs - small modular reactors

Project PELE by DoD

1 MW for less than 100 tons - DoD project bid

nuclear moderator - keeps the neutron collision at check

graphite as a moderator

  • Idaho National Laboratory
  • get data for license - need licese for reactor (which requires data) - chicken and egg problem

you need to build nuclear reactors to build nuclear reactors - Isaiah Taylor

achapalego nation ?? - phillipines

there are about 45 fusion companies trying to do it now

National Ignition Facility - lawerence livermore national laboratory

89% efficiency - by titan at Fuse Co. - 1 Tera Watt

  • cost per joule delivered on target
  • gain efficiency on target

tokomak - Commonwealth Fusion Systems science is undnerstood, engineering is the bottleneck experimenting - proving new electromagnet trying to create a small star in the tokomak spark (commericial prototype) - 100 Mega Watts per device commerically relevant net energy fusion device

cars became less of a beautiful thing - due to efficiency concerns wind power scales up and stagnates at early 90s last 20 years energy production has been flat

the key thing is to turn conventional wisdom around -

consuming less energy - environmentalist movement climate activist - cease fossil fuels just stop oil - destroying paintings

paul erlich - more humans bad …

manufacturing raw materials - aluminium, steel- use more energy

10 kW - society

by making resources infinitely available → people won’t think of land as a resource to conquer → eliminate war

parallely scale effiency per watt and the amount of watt generated - example of chips

Divisions of the documentary

peat - 1100s to 1600s - partially decayed plant matter
coal - 1600s
fossil fuels - 1800s
solar panels - 1900s - solar photovoltaic power -
the grid -1800s
the fission - 1900s
today’s nuclear - 2000s
fusion - 2000s
energy abundance and stagnation
geo politics - war for energy
building an abundant future

Graph View