Nuclear Fission, Fusion and Fiction

Today’s nuclear plants are expensive and produce waste that remains radioactive for thousands of years.  Some people consider them dangerous but that, Chernobyl excepted, is more potential than real. Like the original atom bomb, the energy is from fission – breaking apart large atoms such as uranium.  Since the 1940s, the hope has been to produce clean energy the opposite way, namely by fusing isotopes of the smallest atom, hydrogen, to produce helium and large amounts of electricity which do not depend on the wind blowing or the sun shining.  This is how the sun and all other stars produce light and heat. The trouble is that the hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, have positive nuclei and are extremely reluctant to fuse. Stars use their massive gravitational forces to overcome this reluctance but we have no means of replicating anything like those forces on earth. 

Never ones to let such obstacles get in the way, researchers claim they can deliver commercial fusion power, if not by 2050, then at least by the end of the century.The research budgets have grown: in October 2019, the UK committed “£220M to the conceptual design of a fusion power station – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP).” “A ‘tokamak’ is a machine that confines a plasma using magnetic fields in a donut shape that scientists call a torus. [It can also be spherical.] Fusion energy scientists believe that tokamaks are the leading plasma confinement concept for future fusion power plants.” The Russians invented this technology around 1958 and the word “tokamak” is an acronym of its description in Russian. The plasma process is explained later. 

The US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Science spends “approximately $700M per year.” On the 16th June, the UK Atomic Energy Authority announced an agreement with the Canadian start-up company, General Fusion, to build a £400M demonstration plant at the authority’s Culham campus.  Note that this will not actually produce any electricity, it will just show how that might be done. Of course, we would be considering far larger sums for the real thing; the budget for ITER, the European fusion project, is US $22bn. The US Department of Energy thinks it will cost $65bn. 

We need to look at these mutually repulsive isotopes a little closer.  Hydrogen, as most people know, is a single proton. Deuterium has the same proton with a neutron attached. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen with a half-life of 12 years with the same old proton but now with two neutrons. It is produced as a by-product in nuclear fission reactors, and would also be formed in fusion reactors by using liquid lithium as the primary coolant. 

When deuterium and tritium nuclei fuse, they form helium kinetic energy. There are many other candidate atoms that could emit energy and power but as the lighter they are, the (relatively) easier it is to produce energy by fusing them, these two isotopes of hydrogen seem the way to go.  We have heard a lot about hydrogen as the clean fuel of the future but it has, as 1930s airship makers found out, its dangers.  If large scale fusion energy worked, the r helium output might be available as fuel in place of the combustible hydrogen. Apparently, whilst it is rare on earth, there is plenty of helium-3 (helium-3 is regular helium with each atom short of a neutron) on the moon and 25 tons of the stuff would power the USA for a year. But this is speculation. 

In terms of energy per unit mass, the yield of fusion is much greater than that of the fission of heavy elements like uranium. This is why nuclear weapons rapidly evolved from fission bombs to hydrogen (fusion) bombs. That leads to the thought that the hybrid fission/fusion model used by hydrogen bombs might be controlled and used for electricity generation in place of the purely fusion models now being pursued.  Unfortunately nuclear fission is only hot and dense enough in a critical mass of several kilogrammes of uranium or plutonium. Then there is a massive nuclear explosion, which would not be popular with the locals. The temperatures that can be safely reached in a controlled nuclear fission device, i.e. a reactor, are way too low for fusion to occur in a deuterium-tritium or deuterium-deuterium mixture. 

Returning to the fundamental problem of getting the two repulsive isotopes to coalesce, one must first collect minute quantities of deuterium from the sea, or wherever, and tritium from those fission reactors you are trying to get rid of. Whilst deuterium is rare on earth, there is plenty in the wider reaches of the solar system, notably on Jupiter, which may be of comfort for the longer term.  Sourcing deuterium, otherwise known as “heavy hydrogen”, in small quantities on this planet for pilot fusion plants is not a major problem; every million atoms of hydrogen taken from the sea yields about 156 atoms of deuterium.  Doing that on a commercial scale, however, might prove more challenging.  

Next, the two isotopes in the form of gases have to be mixed and made into a very, very hot plasma heated by an ionising electric current.  Note that it takes a lot of energy to get the hydrogen, and then the deuterium, and then heat the mixed gas to, say, 100M Kelvin - roughly the same as degrees Celsius and six times hotter than the sun’s core. At these temperatures, the gas becomes a plasma, i.e. a high energy state of matter in which the electrons are stripped away and move freely about.  It is the high temperature that gives the isotopes enough energy to overcome their mutual repulsion. If you are wondering how I know all this, this blog was based on emails from a respected physicist who prefers not to be named as he is not a specialist fusion scientist.  

We are not done yet. Tritium is radioactive and may leak from reactors. There may well be substantial environmental radioactivity releases.  The plasma vessel can only be handled remotely for the year after use. Lithium is used as the buffer material but availability of that too, thanks to heavy use for batteries, is threatened.  It is even claimed we will run out in 2025. There are plenty more engineering and production issues to resolve, and differing methodologies to select, but we need not consider those now.  They all add up to a colossal energy requirement to fuel and operate a nuclear fusion plant.  So far no one has managed to make a fusion device produce more energy out than in, for more than several seconds. If we do, will we have to trawl the solar system to gather the raw materials? 

It does not look like anyone yet knows the answers to all of the above issues.  We will hear of “break-throughs” and some will be real and some mythical, “cold fusion” for example.  Nevertheless, it seems certain that nuclear fusion will make little or no contribution to zero carbon by 2050.    

The difference between make and receive

We’re noting one of those little linguistic changes that are designed to deceive:

Covid jabs for billions of humans will earn their makers billions of dollars

The word “earn” usually means, with respect to corporate matters, the profit made, not the revenue:

We look at the drug firms – led by Pfizer and Moderna – that are set to profit most in an unprecedented global vaccination drive

The one thing the rest of the article does not even mention is profit.

Pfizer and Moderna, which are charging $30-plus per person for the required two shots in Europe and the US, will take the lion’s share. Analysts believe they could make more than $50bn in revenues collectively from their Covid jabs this year.

Everything is about revenue. And that’s not, entirely not, the same thing. Yet there’s - OK, to our eyes there is - a determined effort underway to blur this vital distinction. We see it when people talk about the taxation of Amazon for example. Reference is made to revenues - that hundred billion or whatever it is - and the tax bill on the profits. But the revenue isn’t the same as the earnings, the amount made. The comparison between tax paid on earnings and gross revenue misleads - deliberately we think - vastly more than it reveals.

We’ve been through all this before of course. Time was that poverty meant crustless waifs being stuffed up chimneys to avoid their actual starvation. Then came the idea of relative poverty - being in a household with less than 60% of median earnings - and over time that distinction of “relative” was dropped. Leading to people insisting, with an entirely straight face, that Poland has less child poverty than the UK, a place thrice as rich. That’s not how the actual, as opposed to relative, living standards of children work out in reality.

The general realisation that the word has changed meaning in such propaganda takes some time to arrive. By which time the work is done, all are convinced that not having the third pair of trainers like the kids down the road is the same as being crustless - or even to be stuffed up a chimney - and that revenue is the same as profits, that to receive money is the same as to make it.

We should recognise this for what it is, propaganda, not explanation.

This is all something folks can - and will - work out for themselves

A certain inability to understand what people are capable of seems in evidence here:

Workers must be given a right to do their jobs from home, Labour has demanded as it piled pressure on the government not to let its consultation on flexible working be kicked into the long grass.

Hmm:

“Boss, I wanna work from home!”

“Tim, you’re a waiter.”

“Ah, yes, bit of a problem that….”

It is not possible for all jobs to be done from home. Not even that bit where the forks are polished is going to work that way. So, the actual demand is:

Rayner said: “As restrictions lift and we adjust to a ‘new normal’, we need a new deal for working people. As a starting point, this must mean the right to flexible working – not just the right to ask for flexibility – and a duty on employers to accommodate this unless there is a reason a certain job can’t be done flexibly.

So each and every discussion about whether a job can - or will - be done flexibly is going to be a negotiation between worker and employer. Because that’s where that discussion of whether it is possible or not is going to take place, between those two parties.

Which is where the discussion is going to be anyway, whether Angela Rayner gets her new law passed or not. Because that’s where discussions about the details of working arrangements take place right now, always have done, always will.

What happens to the wider economy is the summed and aggregate outcome of all of those individual decisions and negotiations. Rather like - well, exactly the same as - that wider economy anyway, it’s the summed and aggregate outcome of the 65 million of us making arrangements, taking decisions and negotiating with each other.

Folks, you know, adult human beings and all that, are entirely capable of having such conversations about who will do what in which manner. A goodly part of the art of governance is in leaving ‘em be to do so.

Economic policy does matter

From The Times’ obituary for Kenneth Kaunda:

He might have stayed in power and departed at a time of his own choosing but for his Achilles’ heel, an ineptness in economic management, which blighted his country’s development. When he came to power in 1964 Zambia was among the more prosperous of Britain’s former colonies in Africa thanks to earnings from the Copperbelt in the north. Even greater wealth might have been harvested from the Zambian soil, which was and remains some of the finest farming land in Africa. But, like his friend Julius Nyerere, the president of Tanzania, Kaunda trusted to socialist agricultural policies with disastrous results, and when the copper price fell in the 1970s Zambia was precipitated into an economic decline from which it has never recovered.

To create food shortages in a land where you have to leap out of the way of a fallen seed’s zooming growth does require excessively bad policy.

In his early years in office, humanism could be equated with socialist policies; the copper mines were nationalised and agriculture put in the hands of peasant co-operatives and state farms. When the copper price fell and state agriculture became riddled with inefficiency and corruption,

We do like to remind that Tsarist Russia and today’s Russia - for all the faults in both polities - both were/are grain exporters. Soviet Russia, for all the science of the agricultural system, required grain imports.

We seem, as with the Washington Consensus, to have a little list of stupid things that should not be done to any economy. This being one of the pieces of evidence to show that at least a part of economics is in fact a science. Postulate an hypothesis - say, that socialism makes a place rich - and test that against the evidence. When it’s the universe disagreeing with the idea then it’s reality that wins, not the wishful thinking.

A useful lesson for the rest of us perhaps?

Deregulating properly

The task force for innovation, growth and regulatory reform, led by Sir Iain Duncan Smith, reported last Tuesday. It was welcomed by the Prime Minister, which suggests that its general approach might find support among the Better Regulation Cabinet Committee. It sets out a blueprint with over 100 recommendations on how the UK can grasp the opportunities that Brexit brings to reshape its whole approach to regulation.

Its proposals include initiatives to allow greater freedoms to pension funds, to encourage investment in “sunrise” technologies and business start-ups, and to give greater flexibility to the financial sector, while retaining “prudent” regulatory protections.

Our departure from the EU allows us to change three restrictive EU approaches and to replace them with ones that are more in accord with common sense than bureaucratic diktat.

The first is that we can replace the EU’s precautionary principle by the more sensible cost-benefit analysis. The EU line is to prevent innovation until it is “proved safe.” The UK philosophy is more Popperian, recognizing that nothing can ever be ‘proved’ safe, and that we have to weigh up the benefits against the risks. The EU looks only at the downside, and does not take the advantages into account to set against them.

The second change to the EU approach we can make, one on which Sir Iain’s team stress strongly, is that we can move from process-driven regulation to result-driven regulation. The EU style is to set out in detail the technology that must be adopted to achieve the result it seeks. This shuts out inventiveness and innovation. The alternative is to specify the required outcome, and leave it to businesses and individuals to come up with ways of achieving it. This will almost certainly lead to more innovative and cost-effective ways of doing so.

The third change is to revert to the English Common Law practice of allowing interpretation to be decided by case law, rather than by detailed statutory requirements. This means in practice that we can enshrine principles in law, and allow interpretation to be built up by the decisions of juries and tribunals. We could require employers, for example, to provide “adequate” toilet facilities for employees, and instead of setting out in 150 pages of detail what that involved, leave it to the decisions made by good citizens sitting on juries and tribunals to quickly build up a body of case law specifying what previous judgements have decided that this required.

One of the most refreshing aspects of Sir Iain’s task force report is its recognition that regulations impose costs. Big businesses tend to like them because they can absorb those costs, and because they squeeze out would-be competitive market entrants who cannot. The emphasis should be on keeping those costs low enough to achieve their objective, while cutting out the bureaucratic creep that expands and extends them and makes life unnecessarily difficult for would-be start-ups. Implementing most of the task force’s initiatives would indeed tell the world that the UK is now open for business, and especially for new businesses.

The universe appears on a mission to prove Hayek right

A central part of Hayek’s concept of governance, of the world, is that the centre - whether that be messy politics or even a benevolent dictator - simply cannot ever have enough accurate data about the economy to be able to extract the information necessary to manage that world, or economy, in detail.

On Monday, just hours before Boris Johnson pushed back Freedom Day by four weeks, the Government published new modelling, warning that a deadly third wave was on the horizon.

Under the most pessimistic scenario, Imperial College estimated Britain could experience a further 203,824 deaths by next June, while even modest estimates from other groups suggested more than 50,000 would die.

Yet it has now emerged the models were based on out-of-date estimates of vaccine effectiveness, which assumed far fewer people protected by the jabs.

Which does raise an interesting question. There being two possible answers here. The first is simply that Hayek was right. The second is that the universe is striving mightily to prove him right. As we’re not sufficiently even Deist to believe that the universe strives to do anything at all we will run with the conclusion that Hayek was right in the first place. But given the only two possible answers that makes little difference.

It isn’t possible to plan in any detail as the information necessary to do so simply cannot be extracted from reality. Therefore we must stop attempting to plan in any detail. We are left with only the one option. Set the basic rules, yes, of property, incentives, of the law, then leave be and see what happens.

Equality and opportunity

There seems to be a widespread assumption that in our societies equality should be a prime goal. There are other goals, many agree, but they suppose that equality should be a paramount goal, outranking others deemed to be lesser goals.

In John Rawls’ book, “A Theory of Justice,” he famously makes the case that if we were drawing up the composition of a society without knowing what our position in it might be, we’d choose to make it a reasonably equal one. He and many of his followers have thought that this ‘proved’ the case for equality, and that a just society would have to be an equal one.

But as Robert Nozick pointed out almost immediately in “Anarchy, State and Utopia,” such a society would not be equal for long. In his Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment he argued that Wilt Chamberlain might freely choose to exercise his talents for basketball, and that spectators might willingly put 25c in his box to watch him, making him $250,000 richer. To prevent this distortion of equality, the rules would have to prevent people from freely choosing how to exercise their talents, and prevent people from freely choosing how to spend their resources. Few people would call that a just society.

Rawls did not ‘prove’ the case for equality, he assumed it. His assumption was that people would want to be reasonably equal with other people, and would therefore choose a make-up of society in which that happened. But there are those who think that some goals outrank equality. Some would choose a society in which, whatever their role in it, they would have opportunity, the chance to better their lot.

Adam Smith remarked upon “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.” Today we’d make that “every person,” which is what Smith meant. Thomas Jefferson spoke of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” valuing the pursuit of it rather than the attainment of it. Several psychological surveys have shown that people are happier when they feel they are improving their condition than they are in static societies, even those with a higher level of achievement.

Many people value opportunity, and want to live in a society that offers it. This is not equality of opportunity, just the chance of improvement, even when it is not available to everyone in the same degree. A society that does offer opportunity will necessarily be an unequal one because not everyone will avail themselves of the opportunities present to the same extent. It is difficult to conceive how equality of opportunity might be brought about, given that some people have more loving parents, or parents more concerned to help their children to seize opportunities. The childhood environment makes a difference, as does character, and as does chance.

What we can do is work to bring about a society in which everyone can strive to improve their lot and to give themselves and their children better lives. Everyone is a stakeholder, even though not an equal one, in such a society. They all have something to gain from it, together with the chance of self-fulfillment.

The Australian trade deal won't affect British production standards in the slightest

Minette Batters is entirely and wholly wrong here:

Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers’ Union – which bitterly opposed lifting levies on meat imports from Australia – said it would await further details, but was concerned Tuesday’s announcement “made no mention of animal welfare and environmental standards”.

She said: “We will need to know more about any provisions on animal welfare and the environment to ensure our high standards of production are not undermined by the terms of this deal."

The Australian trade deal will make no difference whatsoever to British production standards - whether they’re high or not. Beef - for this is the beef at issue - will be produced in Britain to British standards as previously.

What Ms. Batters is actually complaining about is that British consumers will now have the choice of beef produced to British standards or to Australian ones. This is, of course, an advance in freedom and liberty and so to be welcomed merely on those grounds. What Ms. Batters is worried about is that some to many will choose those Australian standards. Which is, as we say, an advance in liberty and freedom. For those who still prefer the British standards will be able to have them, those who don’t will not be required to.

Which does bring us to a point we’ve made before. The only possible logical reason for denying people such a choice is the fear that they might make the one the proposer of the ban would prefer they didn’t. After all, if everyone continued to prefer British standards then there would be no need at all for restrictions upon Australian beef. The call for the restrictions is this not just an admission it’s a positive insistence that some to many would prefer the Australian option.

And, when put like that, why in heck shouldn’t people have that choice? Why should production standards they don’t desire be imposed upon them?

That is, Ms. Batters, the very fact that you oppose the freedoms is why we should have them. Because you are agreeing that people desire the freedoms by your very opposition to them.

If only Polly Toynbee actually understood

But then if she understood then she’d not be Polly Toynbee of course. For Polly tells us of a new tax explainer from the IFS and insists that it will be a glorious addition to the progressive’s armoury:

Thatcher said you will always spend the pound in your pocket better than the state will. This remains the key political divide: the left believes our taxes buy everything we value beyond price – health, security, education, beautiful parks and public spaces, fine stadiums and leisure centres, museums and galleries. In a country to be proud of, burdens are fairly shared and no one falls below civilised living standards: that requires fair taxes, fairly raised. The right relies on fiscal ignorance. The IFS is impeccably neutral, but its TaxLab will be a great asset for progressives.

Up to a point Lord Copper, up to a point. Take this about corporation tax:

However, economic theory and evidence strongly suggest that the incidence of corporation tax is not exclusively on shareholders. In some cases, companies will set higher prices, or pay lower wages, than they would in the absence of corporation tax, such that part of the burden of the tax will be felt by customers or workers respectively. Evidence shows that corporation tax affects how much companies invest and where they locate their real activities. To the extent that companies respond to corporation tax by doing less investment in the UK, a lower capital stock and associated lower productivity will leave UK employees with lower average wages.

Quite so, entirely reasonable estimates for the US have shareholders and workers carrying 30/70% of that corporation tax burden, others equally reasonable 70/30. One UK estimate is 50/50. Further, we know what determines the split and it was Joe Stiglitz along with Tony Atkinson who pointed out that for a small economy reliant upon foreign investment - so, a developing country - it could be the workers hauling more than 100% of the costs of corporate taxation.

Don’t tax profits because you’ll lower the workers wages isn’t, quite, what the progressives want to hear.

But there’s another point here as well.

A mouse-click shows that people in Britain pay less tax (in 2019 figures), at 33% of GDP, than the EU average of 39%, while in Denmark it’s 46%.

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Democracy depends on citizens understanding what they vote for; ignorance breeds dangerous misconceptions.

....

Voters are unreasonable, demanding Scandinavian services on US-style low tax rates.

Well, OK to each individual point there. But this is to miss that what government spends on those services is very much less than the tax revenue government collects. Denmark spends some 17.5% of everything on such things, the UK some 15.3%. We agree, that’s a difference, but it’s not anything like that of the tax collection. Near all of the rest is redistribution of incomes, not the provision of public, state or government services. That is, it’s entirely possible to have those Scandinavian levels of service without having to have their tax bills. Why, that might even be good idea:

Tax is not a “burden”, but the price we pay for civilisation.

The price we pay for something is the burden we must carry for having that thing. That’s the very definition of price. But we do come to an interesting place here, don’t we? We can have those services which Polly describes as civilisation for very much less than we currently pay for them. Gaining civilisation at less cost sounds like a good idea to us. Why don’t we try it?

All of the things we gain from government - whether they’re done well or badly, could be done better in other ways - in terms of goods and services can be had for 15 to 20% of GDP. Everything else is just shuffling bits of paper between citizens. A state limited to those necessary goods and services has its attractions. This not being something we expect progressives to be interested in hearing.

So, that's that problem solved already then

We are told that the virus lockdown and associated actions have led to something happening.

The number of homeless households rose slightly in 2020-21 compared with the previous year.

Ah, so the virus and lockdown and associated actions in fact made pretty much no difference then. That’s good. There is also this:

At least 130,000 households in England were made homeless during the first year of the pandemic

That does seem remarkable though. We rather think that it would be possible to see this. That number sleeping rough, exposed to the elements, would be easily visible, wouldn’t it?

Analysis of published government homelessness statistics and figures collected under the Freedom of Information Act from around 70% of local authorities in England show that 132,362 households were assessed by councils as being owed the “relief duty”, where a household is deemed to already be homeless.

Ah, all is explained. This is a celebration of the glorious success of the welfare system. Without it there would have been - OK, could have been - 132,362 households forced to sleep in the rain. What is being measured here is the number of households - because that is what they are measuring, the number of people kept out of the rain - who could have been but were not, in fact, made homeless. Because we have a system that deals with the risk of homelessness, those local councils having a duty to provide a solution.

So, that’s nice then, isn’t it? We need a system to protect people from sleeping in the rain, we have one, time for the Happy Dance, no?

Given that this is all sorted which is the next problem that we need to find a solution to?