First of a Kind or Dying Gasp?

On July 31, 2023, Unit 3 of the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant entered commercial service.  It is the first new reactor to be brought online in the United States since 2016, and only the second since 1996.  It is a Westinghouse AP1000, which is a two-loop (of primary coolant) design derived from the Combustion Engineering System 80.  It is classified as a Generation III+ reactor, which is a somewhat arbitrary marketing designation used by the nuclear industry to indicate the design has some passive elements in its safety systems.  An additional reactor of the same design is under construction at the Vogtle plant, and should become operational within a year.

The probability of Vogtle 3 and 4 being safe reactors is quite high.  The fundamental design is not new, and China has operated four AP1000 reactors since 2019 without incident.*  The Georgia plant is located inland, so there is no risk of tsunamis flooding the site.  Georgia Power and the American nuclear industry as a whole have a lot of operational experience at this point - far more than when Three Mile Island Unit 2 was operated incorrectly, causing a major accident in 1979.  The first large power reactor in America went online in 1968; the industry has an additional 44 years of experience since the TMI meltdown.

What the nuclear industry has not improved since 1979 is the cost of constructing reactors.  I am not going go down the rabbit hole of attempting to compare costs between different sources of electricity in this post, but it is very safe to say that Vogtle 3 was not cheap to build, and neither Unit 3 or 4 were as cheap as was promised by Westinghouse back in 2013 when construction started.  Why costs escalated so much is hotly debated, but Westinghouse and its subcontractors are responsible for a good portion of the blame.  The nuclear industry also has to compete with other power generation technologies, and the shale gas "revolution" made the economic case for nuclear power difficult even before the cost overruns at Vogtle and Summer were known.

The cost of large plants is why the nuclear industry has shifted to promoting "small modular reactors" - some of which aren't all that small, and none of which will be any cheaper than large reactors if the companies developing them don't get enough orders to justify building the factories that would enable serial construction using transportable modules.  However, the SMR vendors have yet to prove themselves to be failures, so the hype surrounding them continues.  This contrasts sharply with the prospects for new large reactors.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission website indicates there are active combined licenses for six more large reactors, but none of those are under construction, and six previous licenses have been withdrawn by the license holders.  Two of those licenses were for AP1000 reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina, which were so far over budget that the power company building them canceled them in 2017.  So Vogtle Unit 4 is likely to be the last large reactor to go critical in American in the next 15 years, at the very least.

Below is a chart showing all of the commercial power reactors built in America sorted by date of commercial operation.  It does not include the 43 reactors that were canceled after construction was started, nor a number of small reactors that were not intended for commercial operations despite being connected to the local grid.  Despite a number of announcements, there are no SMRs under construction as of today (2023-08-02).

* That we know of, of course.  But there has certainly been no major accidents, as those are subject to detection by remote monitoring.

Say No to Mars on Drugs, Bitches

I've long been a skeptic of the idea of sending humans to Mars before we can determine whether or not there is a functioning biosphere on the planet.  This recent post articulates my thoughts better than I ever could.  Some choice quotes:

At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.

I would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins. Both are colossal engineering problems, possibly the hardest ever attempted, but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving. In both cases, the difficulty flows from a very specific design constraint, and it’s worth revisiting that constraint one or ten times before starting to perform miracles of engineering.

Even the astronaut corps recognizes that exploring Mars and keeping it pristine are irreconcilable activities, like trying to drill for oil in a cleanroom. The problem goes beyond practical questions like how to store 17 months of astronaut shit and gets to the crux of the matter: why is bringing a leaky, bacteria-filled terrarium to Mars step one in our search for Martian life? What incredible ability do astronauts have that justifies taking this risk?

And it is hard to overlook that the $93 billion NASA has already spent through 2025 to not land anyone on the Moon would be enough to send probes to every world in the solar system, including moons we know have oceans of liquid water and two entire planetary systems that haven’t been visited since Voyager 2 gave them a quick once-over in the 1980’s.

The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat?— get no love from Elon. Once you get beyond “rocket factory go brrrrr,” there is no plan, just a familiar fog of Musky woo. The Mars rockets will refuel from autonomous robot factories powered by sunlight. Their crews will be shielded from radiation by some form of electromagnetic handwaving. Life support, the hardest practical problem in space travel, “is actually quite easy”. And of course Musk dismisses the problem of microbial contamination (which I can’t emphasize enough is governed by international treaty) as both inevitable and no big deal.

The arguments against any country or company sending a mission to Mars are overwhelming.  But the subject has become an entirely emotional discussion, like the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating COVID, though with less immediate harm.  Budgetary realities will probably push the problem out well into the 2040s at least, by which time a bit more reality will hopefully intrude and the whole project will be scrapped in favor of more robotics.

2022: At Least It Wasn't 2021, Which Wasn't 2020

2022 was an improvement for most of the world over a bad 2021, which was better than the horrid year of 2020.  But it still wasn't great.

On the positive side:

• The COVID pandemic subsided to an elevated (relative to flu) endemic level in most of the world, though deaths remain higher than would be the case if vaccination hadn't been politicized in certain countries and nationalized in others.
  
• Democrats maintained control of the Senate, meaning Biden will be able to continue making quality judicial appointments.
  
• The fascist-sounding COVID promoter Bolsonaro was defeated in Brazil, and he did not attempt to overturn the results by force.
• The Inflation Reduction Act is not a perfect climate bill, but it was an important step forward.
  
• JWST came online and produced spectacular images.
  

On the negative side:

• Putin ordered the Russian military to invaded Ukraine for no reason other than he is a bitter old man who remains traumatized by the fall of the Soviet Union 31 years ago.  Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and millions more displaced as a result.
  
• Republicans took control of the House, which will lead to a dysfunctional US government for the next two years.
• The Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade, ending legal abortion and degrading women's health in many states.
  
• A petty man-child took over Twitter, a highly influential social media site, and proceed to fire thousands and undermine the communities that depend on the site.
  

On the worrisome but unresolved side:

• Central bank interest rate hikes in response to elevated inflation, led by the US Federal Reserve, may help trigger a recession in 2023.
• Republicans are still threatening to use the debt limit to hold the country hostage.
  
• China's overly restrictive COVID policies were dramatically and impetuously near the end of the year by dictator-for-life Xi, which will probably lead to a large surge in deaths and continued disruptions in the world's second-largest economy.

RIP, Queen of the Skies

The last Boeing 747 left the Everett, Washington factory yesterday, 2022-12-06. The pioneering and now-venerable design will continue to fly for at least a couple of decades for cargo operators and in government fleets, but as of this writing there are no American passenger aircraft of the type. This makes me a little sad, as the 747 is so impressive and iconic, symbolizing in every image the promise of the jet age. Its most direct replacement, the 777, is incredibly impressive in its own right, but it just isn't as distinctive as the 747. I would have liked for the 747 to be built forever, but commercial quad jets are doomed by the relentless logic of accounting. I hope that Boeing can at some point recover from the disastrous reverse takeover by McDonnell-Douglas so that it can engineer and produce the next great icon of the skies. But until then, blue skies and tailwinds to all the remaining 747s.

Predictions Are Hard - 2022 Edition

Predictions are actually easy; it's accurate predictions that are hard.  I'm only going to make inaccurate predictions today, since I haven't paid any attention to polling this year.

Senate - 47 D+I, 53 R

House - 208 D, 227 R 

Update 2022-12-07:

Senate - 51 D+I, 49 R

House - 213 D, 222 R 

Better than I expected!  That will teach me to not be lazy, if I ever get around to learning the lesson.

The loss of the House is a big blow, but the Dems over-performed relative to the baseline.  And a gain of one Senator will not only prevent a flood of shitty bills emanating from Congress, it will diminish the power of any narcissistic Dems who would annoint themselves co-President.

Random Book Review - A Song of Ice and Fire (so far)

Author: George R. R. Martin
Released: 1996-2011
Format reviewed: Mass-market paperback
Pages of content: 5,285 (per internet sources)
Rating: incomplete

I started re-reading the ASOIAF books and stopped because I realized I would be disappointed... again.  While Martin is under no legal obligation to his readers to complete the series, he is at risk of betraying a promise implicit in the beginning of every story: that there will be an end.  Sure, the GoT television series provided an end, but to a different story, one that was heavily re-written to meet the needs of the format.  I (and a great many other readers, I suspect) want to be given the end to the original work, in the original format.  (It was obvious by books 4-5 Martin was writing with an eye to creating an episodic television series, and it was part of the reason those books weren't as good as the first three.)

It is hard to recommend that a reader of speculative fiction not read what is one of the best high fantasy novels ever written (book 1, A Game of Thrones), so I can only ask that readers who haven't encountered the series not start it until Martin shows he is serious about completing the work.  Instead, they should invest in completed series or other ongoing series where the author is likely to finish the story.  Martin has for years stated on his blog that he is continuing to write the next book and has completed many hundreds of manuscript pages.  Those claims, to me, indicate that the author isn't really in control of his material, and that his editor(s) have no leverage over him that will force him to focus.  The latter is unsurprising, as Martin is probably the second most successful living speculative fiction author, trailing only J. K. Rowling, who has become a billionaire on the back of her very popular (but much less inventive) Harry Potter series.

Martin's continued involvement in many other projects, ranging from an ASOIAF prequel series to a dinner train in New Mexico, is an indicator he is bored with his creation.  That is his prerogative - it is his life to live and, as I said, he is under no legal obligation to complete the series.  But I think it is bad for speculative fiction in general that such a famous series can be so neglected that it risks being left unfinished.  Readers will be more hesitant to plunge into a new mega-series if they don't believe it will be finished.  While mega-series are not the end-all and be-all of the speculative fiction genres, they have drawn in a lot of new readers, and are an important part of the industry, much as Hollywood blockbusters are important to the movie industry.  I hope for the sake of his readers and speculative fiction in general that Martin finishes ASOIAF.  I just don't really expect him to do so at this point, and that disappoints me.

Random Book Review - The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History

Author: William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman
Released: 2013
Format reviewed: Hardcover
Pages of content: 283
Rating: 2/5

The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History is an interesting but poorly edited book that doesn't prove its overly long title.  It covers the effects of the 1815 eruption of the Mount Tambora stratovolcano on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, which is by current consensus the largest eruption of at least the past 1000 years.  It focuses in on the details of the weather in 1816 in eastern North America and Northwestern Europe, and on the subsequent effects on food availability

Unfortunately, the descriptions of weather often run on far longer than they really need to, and only the authors' engaging writing style save large portions of the book from extreme tedium.  In some cases the details of a single day can run to several pages.  The book is also completely lacking in graphics, even basic maps, which can be frustrating to someone who hasn't memorized the location of minor European cities such as Glarus.  Yes, the internet exists, but a book is still a low tech device that can be used anywhere there is light, and a non-fiction book should not shun visual information so completely as this one.

Overall, I found The Year Without Summer readable but disappointing.  Its description of the details of the eruption is cursory, and it doesn't attempt to link climate to the weather that fills so many of its pages.  The book is almost exclusively focused on Northeast America and Northwest Europe, which may interest readers of an English-language book printed in America more than other places around the world, but the limited geography betrays the title.  And it does very little to prove that the eruption changed history.  I can't recommend this book to anyone other than specialists who might find use for the detailed description of the weather in the time period.