To Reinvent What Was Already Invented, Nuclear Engineers Need the Right to Screw Up to Thus Save the World.
My son purloined my copy of Alvin Weinberg's The First Nuclear Era which is a fun read, since it offers an account of developmental screw ups, leaks and the like, that led to development of the world's only infinitely expandable form of energy that is essentially independent of carbon dioxide, nuclear energy.
It's just as well that my son has it. It is his task to save the world my generation has gone so far to destroy. I can do nothing more than to hope for him:
I'm not shy in proclaiming my opinion that nuclear energy is the last best hope of the human race.
In my news feed today, came an interesting article about how we lost the benefit of previous screw ups, except in written accounts, and need the freedom to screw up anew, guided by the detailed accounts of previous screwups.
We now know, as they did not know in the first nuclear era, the consequences of large scale industrial nuclear accidents, primarily from Chernobyl and Fukushima. The fact that these events, while serious, are extremely minor when compared to the on going destruction of the planetary atmosphere, should, as opposed to the way they are often betrayed in the massive popular exercise of idiotic selective attention, be reassuring.
The key to utilizing nuclear technology is, in my view, and in the view of many others, high temperatures, this to extract the maximal exergy out of nuclear fuel, and via this path, eliminate the use of all fossil fuels, in part by closing the industrial carbon cycle by having the primary energy to do it.
The interesting article and some excerpts:
High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
By Brian Kelleher, Nuclear Newswire, May 8, 2025.
None of the advanced coolant concepts are truly new; in fact, nearly all were proposed and explored for fission power purposes during the 1940s and 1950s.4,5 Originally formulated to enable breeder technology and limitless fuel, the technical need and financial stomach for advanced fluids were surpassed sometime in the 1980s...
Forty years later, those searching for methods to impact climate change have once again turned to high-temperature fluids and the new power generation methods they may enable. These futurists are faced with a monumental challenge and are starting from the ground up. While salts and liquid metals were a near-mature technology 50 years ago, they were cut off from intergenerational technology transfer during the abrupt decline of the United States’ advanced nuclear program in the early 1990s.6–8 Many of the field’s leaders have long since retired or passed away, forcing a new crop of engineers to revitalize high-temperature fluid technology from old papers and re-created laboratory experiments.
It is this author’s opinion that for these new engineers to be successful, they must emulate the key behaviors and conditions of the field’s founders. Distilled to basics, an adventurous, pioneering spirit with a tolerance for mistakes must be established...
...Modern engineers admire the achievements of their predecessors and understand the utility of past work but are fearful of undertaking these tasks themselves. This is evidenced by the considerable development effort that goes toward simulation, modeling, surrogate work, and benchtop tinkering. While the root trouble of advanced nuclear power—and hence the implementation of these high-temperature fluids—is consistently blamed on oppressive regulation and high costs, one cannot ignore that the pioneering, hardware-focused spirit of the 1960s has also been lost along the way.19,20
As theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson aptly said, “The adventurers, the experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control.”21 Once filled with boundary pushers, the field of nuclear engineering has adopted a rigid culture with no margin for failure. While this approach is warranted for commercial systems where public safety must be held above all, it is not a productive nursery for research-level systems. A conservative, one-size-fits-all nuclear culture focused on minimizing risk is detrimental for the field’s future...
...Today’s thermal hydraulics experts are isolated and scattered across academia, private industry, start-ups, and national laboratories. There is no central brain trust, and this leads to repetitive mistakes and hardship. Even worse, the largest-scale advanced fluid research today is being performed by private companies that have the desire for eventual profit through intellectual property. While in pursuit of long-term profits, each of these companies keep trade secrets and common knowledge from the others, forcing each of them to reinvent basic techniques, practices, standards, requirements, and skill base. All of this results in waste and hardship, which will prevent intellectual property from being developed in the first place.
A sure way to avoid reinventing the wheel is to have an open and honest discussion of difficulties among peers. Best practices could be documented by committee, not unlike that of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code, so that foundational knowledge is preserved and disseminated. This would greatly increase the deployment odds of this technology...
It is not true, despite the cultural absurdity that represents it as so, that preventing any single death resulting from a failure of nuclear technology justifies tens of millions of deaths every decade from the normal operations of fossil fuels, coupled with the on going complete destruction of the planetary ecosystem.
This, I think, was a wonderful commentary on the case.