Farlops Industries

The DOE has developed a small, self-contained nuclear power plant called SSTAR. The plan is that these would be sold to developing nations to meet their growing electricity needs while at the same time reducing the danger of nuclear proliferation and stolen fuel.

The units are designed to be essentially nuclear batteries. You just move one to a site, attach high tension wires to it, use it until the fuel spends itself in 30 years, unhook and replace it with a fresh one and return the spent unit to a authorized recycling factory.

The idea is that because the unit is sealed and mostly maintenance free, it would easy for international inspectors to monitor them for signs of tampering or theft of nuclear materials.

That’s the theory at any rate. Somehow I doubt it will be that easy in practice. Many people will probably complain about shipping these to and from sites and the possibility of accidents. Another thing I think the DOE should have done was design them to use something like the CANDU fuel cycle thus avoiding the use military grade fuels at all. Then there is still the lingering problem of cheaply cleaning up, or better still recycling, nuclear materials of all sorts. Still, as fossil fuels dry up, nuclear energy is unavoidably going to play a larger role in our future.

Just came across a BBC article about a new desalination technology being used in Israel. This is a good thing, hopefully removing a bone of contention in violent region of the world.

I haven’t really been paying attention these last few weeks but a lot of interest is being generated on the sites I read (CRN, WorldChanging, Cyborg Democracy) about something called a Fab Lab.

As near as I can understand, a Fab Lab is an inexpensive (Well–around 20,000 dollars–so it’s actually very expensive for places like Ghana’s Takoradi Technical Institute.) set of prototyping and fabrication tools–an advanced machine shop of sorts. The idea behind this is radical. Essentially what is being done here is to create a complete factory in a large room. Eventually these fab labs would need only raw materials, creative labor and electric power and could, in theory, make almost anything, including more fab labs.

Industrialization usually starts in endeavors are that are easy to mechanize, like textile manufacturing. Fab labs could, in theory, generalize this, at least in the design sense. In the future it might be possible for a bright engineer or technician in Ghana to design an item, perhaps some running shoes, that is easily transferable to other fab labs, patent it, make a lot of money off it or, more likely, have it pirated. Fab labs, minifacs, desktop factories, general assemblers, whatever you want to call them, they appear to be an emerging disruptive technology.

I guess I am a disillusioned environmentalist. I’d like to see the Earth totally unspoiled by any human activity but realistically I know that this is mostly a loosing battle. We may recycle, telecommuting and delivery may allow us to drive a lot less, we may drive cars with hybrid powerplants, we may consume less and reuse more, solar and wind energy may become cheaper but, in the end, the Earth’s population continues to grow and the developing world won’t settle for anything less than a standard of living equal to the post-industrial world. Most of the unspoiled areas of the world are essentially doomed. The radical greens can spike all the trees and bomb all the labs they want. Short of destroying all of humanity and thus preventing something like technology from ever emerging again, they will fail in the long run. This is bleak and horrible but I don’t really see any way we can avoid it.

The economic expansion of China (Or Brazil, India, Indonesia, etc.) is exactly what I am talking about. China is very ambitious and is bent on evolution and improvement on all fronts. They have seen how people in Western Europe, North America, Southern Oceania and elsewhere in Asia live and they want that too, no matter what it takes. If they have to burn all the coal, if they have to build twenty more dams the size of Three Gorges, if they have to, for example, build five times the number of nuclear powerplants the rest of the world has in total, they will.

There might be ways to reverse most of the damage that we’ve done and will do to the biosphere. Molecular manufacturing and space colonization are two things that have been proposed. But mechanosynthesis won’t restore extinct species for which we have no preserved DNA and, more to the point, it doesn’t exist yet. Requiring everyone to undergo bioengineering to be forceably evacuated to space colonies is an excerise left to students of public policy and political science. In short, the Earth, unavoidably, will eventually resemble a suburban shopping mall. The diversity of the biosphere will be greatly simplified. I’m not any happier about that than you are.

At last some progress is slowly being made in the field of batteries! The recent news at FuturePundit is that thin film fuel cells will one day be efficient enough to lead significant changes in electric power distribution. The idea goes, once batteries get good enough, energy storage can be extensively decentralized, perhaps with synergistic increases in efficiency. Future Pundit’s article is also interesting for the long debate about solar power in the comments that followed but I wonder if some of the commentators are aware of the work pointed to by Demos Nanotech involving novel methods of electrolysis.

So why do I care about this?

Energy production, distribution and use are at the root of many serious political problems in these modern times. From our current occupation of Iraq and exploitation of oil reserves in Alaska to the long term feasibility of nuclear and solar energy, it’s all a big deal.

Another big deal is the feasibility of molecular manufacturing. Recently some arguments have been leveled against it but, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology reports that these arguments are based on false premises. Since molecular manufacturing, if it’s feasible, can only make current fuel cells that much more efficient the two subjects are related in my mind.