Modern Luddites

Legend has it Ned Ludd led a band of nineteenth century loom operators on a rampage to destroy mechanized looms that threatened their jobs and wages. They were hanged for their crimes and Ludd's name entered the language meaning one who resists technological innovation. Most of the old loom operators did lose their jobs and there are those today who believe the industrial revolution was a bad thing, never mind that it ushered in an era of prosperity history had never known. Today's most prominent Luddites would destroy not machinery but the fossil fuels that power it, all in the cause of saving the planet. Their mantra is renewable energy but one suspects a hidden Malthusian motive. At seven billion and climbing there are too many of us. The renewable energy of choice, wind and solar, won't support us all. If we were fewer, those who are left could return to the pristine world they imagine it would be. Fortunately, especially for the world's remaining poor, Luddites and Malthusians alike always underestimate man's ingenuity and ability to adapt. All the talk about climate change has produced an array of new technologies. Hydraulic fracking has already had a dramatic impact on relatively clean burning natural gas. Even the price of gasoline is down, though it has edged back up recently. And there are more nuclear engineers doing more interesting work than at any time at least since Three Mile Island. The nuclear developments are particularly interesting. Today's reactors are all based on the same basic water cooled design with elaborate and expensive safety mechanisms to prevent meltdowns. That most new ones are being built in places like China with less than transparent oversight does not inspire confidence. But new designs are coming out that are small, inexpensive, modular, and walk away safe. Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works Lab thinks they can have a fusion reactor ready within a decade that will fit on the back of a truck and can be used to power a ship, a factory, or a small town without impacting the existing grid, and without producing radioactive waste. Transatomic Power is a startup founded by two MIT engineers to develop a design based on a molten salt reactor that will use existing nuclear waste as fuel. Molten salt reactors aren't really new. Oak Ridge National Laboratories developed them in the 60's before the Nixon administration pulled the plug on them in 1973. But interest has revived because of inherent advantages. They are said to be meltdown proof and produce relatively low levels of nuclear waste. There are a number of other designs in the works, none of them particularly useful in the production of nuclear weapons. Some of them use thorium for fuel, a radioactive element several times more abundant than uranium. An inexhaustible, safe, and universally available supply of inexpensive energy may be within reach. Don't discount the Luddites. They will surely demagogue the technology, regardless of how safe and beneficial. I suspect they will get their way for a time. But like Ned Ludd they are swimming against the tide. China will get its energy. So will India, and so will sub Saharan Africa. They will use it to lift their poor into the middle class. Memory of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima will no doubt retard nuclear deployment in the West but if, as appears likely, it can bring affordable and reliable electricity to corners of the globe that never had it, then those places will adopt it. In recent decades the world has made remarkable progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty. We may be about to make some more, due in no small part to the Luddites who would try to stop it.