I know but, Thalidomide, or whatever, that went really haywire, they did a good job, people are scared. They’re not scared of videogames, they’re scared of dangerous pharmaceuticals
Worth noting that the FDA’s good job on thalidomide happened before the most recent major round of standards-tightening. Not because of it. That good job is not necessarily much evidence that the FDA since thalidomide is similarly well equipped to do a good job. Which, I think we saw when looking at what passed for “warp speed” in 2020-2021.
My alternate theory on why nuclear energy really stopped, is that it was dystopian or even apocalyptic, because it turned out to be very dual-use. If you build nuclear power-plants, it’s only one step away from building nuclear weapons. And it turned out to be a lot trickier to separate those two things out than it looked.
I think Thiel is wrong on this. Nuclear power plants are as close to dual use as they are in part because they are descended from military reactors designed to produce material for weapons. We created the NRC and effectively banned design improvements before civilian reactor research got all that far. Today we have a lot of improved reactor designs that are much further from dual use, much more resistant to catastrophic failure, much easier to scale to smaller size, and that produce much less waste, but never allowed ourselves to build them. It’s now been long enough that almost everyone who was an adult during Three Mile Island, and most who were adults during Chernobyl, has since retired, and so maybe the clear growing need for more baseload clean power will finally be able to overcome the regulatory barriers and restart development and deployment of new nuclear with better, more modern tech.
Being from Germany myself, I think the anti-nuclear movement in Germany that was against nuclear weapons on German soil was also very much against nuclear power plants because they saw the connection. To me that seems one of the reasons why Germany is much more anti-nuclear than other EU countries.
As far as the substance goes, nuclear power plants being dual-use is not the biggest concern. The biggest concern is that uranium enrichment is dual-use. A facility that can enrich uranium enough to be useful for nuclear reactors can also be used to enrich it to be weapon-grade.
When thinking about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, people thought about making a deal where Iran can have nuclear power plants but no uranium enrichment facilities and gets the enriched uranium from the outside, because the uranium enrichment facilities are the key concern.
Today we have a lot of improved reactor designs that are much further from dual use, much more resistant to catastrophic failure, much easier to scale to smaller size, and that produce much less waste, but never allowed ourselves to build them.
I agree on the resistance to failure and less waste production, but disagree on dual use. Thorium produces uranium-233 which can be used for nuclear reactions. Unlike uranium 235 based energy reactors, thorium produces more uranium-233 than it consumes in the course of producing energy. With thorium reactors, all energy reactors will be producing weapons grade nuclear material. This may be less efficient than traditional reactors dedicated to making nuclear weapons material, but converting a thorium energy plant from energy to weapons making is more trivial. And if as you say these new reactors design are more simple and small, the capital costs will be much lower, and since thorium is abundant the operational costs are much lower, so the plants will be more spread out geographically and new nations will get it. Overall the headache to global intelligence agencies is much higher.
I also think beyond these specific objections, the dual-use nature nuclear is “overdetermined”. There’s an amusing part of the interview where Thiel points out that the history of industrial advancement was moving from energy sources that take up more space to ones that take up less, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. and now we’re moving back to natural gas which takes up more space and solar panels that take up a lot of land. Anyways, the atom fundamentally has a lot of energy in it, E=mc2. but massive amounts of energy in a small space is easy to turn into large explosions. The thing that makes nuclear attractive is the same thing that makes it dangerous. There’s been incredible technical progress in preventing nuclear accidents but preventing nuclear weapons requires geopolitical solutions.
I was thinking more about advanced uranium reactor designs rather than thorium. For example, a lot of SMR designs are sealed, making it harder to access fuel/waste during the lifetime or modify operation. Some are also fast neutron reactors, burners not breeders. That means they contain less total fissile material initially than they otherwise would, and consume a large proportion of what would otherwise be fissile or long lived waste.
Yes, you do have to be concerned about people opening them up and modifying them to breeder reactors—but honestly, I think that “Don’t allow sales to people who will do that, and also require monitoring to prevent modification” is enough to deter most of the problems, and for what’s left, the difference between being able to do that and being able to figure it out for yourself is not nearly as high a hurdle as it was 50-70 years ago.
Worth noting that the FDA’s good job on thalidomide happened before the most recent major round of standards-tightening. Not because of it. That good job is not necessarily much evidence that the FDA since thalidomide is similarly well equipped to do a good job. Which, I think we saw when looking at what passed for “warp speed” in 2020-2021.
I think Thiel is wrong on this. Nuclear power plants are as close to dual use as they are in part because they are descended from military reactors designed to produce material for weapons. We created the NRC and effectively banned design improvements before civilian reactor research got all that far. Today we have a lot of improved reactor designs that are much further from dual use, much more resistant to catastrophic failure, much easier to scale to smaller size, and that produce much less waste, but never allowed ourselves to build them. It’s now been long enough that almost everyone who was an adult during Three Mile Island, and most who were adults during Chernobyl, has since retired, and so maybe the clear growing need for more baseload clean power will finally be able to overcome the regulatory barriers and restart development and deployment of new nuclear with better, more modern tech.
Being from Germany myself, I think the anti-nuclear movement in Germany that was against nuclear weapons on German soil was also very much against nuclear power plants because they saw the connection. To me that seems one of the reasons why Germany is much more anti-nuclear than other EU countries.
As far as the substance goes, nuclear power plants being dual-use is not the biggest concern. The biggest concern is that uranium enrichment is dual-use. A facility that can enrich uranium enough to be useful for nuclear reactors can also be used to enrich it to be weapon-grade.
When thinking about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, people thought about making a deal where Iran can have nuclear power plants but no uranium enrichment facilities and gets the enriched uranium from the outside, because the uranium enrichment facilities are the key concern.
I agree on the resistance to failure and less waste production, but disagree on dual use.
Thorium produces uranium-233 which can be used for nuclear reactions. Unlike uranium 235 based energy reactors, thorium produces more uranium-233 than it consumes in the course of producing energy. With thorium reactors, all energy reactors will be producing weapons grade nuclear material. This may be less efficient than traditional reactors dedicated to making nuclear weapons material, but converting a thorium energy plant from energy to weapons making is more trivial.
And if as you say these new reactors design are more simple and small, the capital costs will be much lower, and since thorium is abundant the operational costs are much lower, so the plants will be more spread out geographically and new nations will get it. Overall the headache to global intelligence agencies is much higher.
I also think beyond these specific objections, the dual-use nature nuclear is “overdetermined”. There’s an amusing part of the interview where Thiel points out that the history of industrial advancement was moving from energy sources that take up more space to ones that take up less, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. and now we’re moving back to natural gas which takes up more space and solar panels that take up a lot of land. Anyways, the atom fundamentally has a lot of energy in it, E=mc2. but massive amounts of energy in a small space is easy to turn into large explosions. The thing that makes nuclear attractive is the same thing that makes it dangerous. There’s been incredible technical progress in preventing nuclear accidents but preventing nuclear weapons requires geopolitical solutions.
I was thinking more about advanced uranium reactor designs rather than thorium. For example, a lot of SMR designs are sealed, making it harder to access fuel/waste during the lifetime or modify operation. Some are also fast neutron reactors, burners not breeders. That means they contain less total fissile material initially than they otherwise would, and consume a large proportion of what would otherwise be fissile or long lived waste.
Yes, you do have to be concerned about people opening them up and modifying them to breeder reactors—but honestly, I think that “Don’t allow sales to people who will do that, and also require monitoring to prevent modification” is enough to deter most of the problems, and for what’s left, the difference between being able to do that and being able to figure it out for yourself is not nearly as high a hurdle as it was 50-70 years ago.