Is Fusion Power the Daniel Plainview to Renewables' Eli Sunday?
A prediction about climate politics and fusion.
Some links:
https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908
https://www.ft.com/content/dcb75a56-ca23-439c-96db-56483979bf34
Pretty neat.
(“Pretty neat” is the only way our culture currently has of registering this information. Like it’s the next version of the iphone or a new instagram filter. Fusion power would be the biggest energy revolution since the invention of the campfire. Pretty neat.)
I have a prediction about climate politics and fusion. My prediction is that, as fusion energy inches closer to being a reality, the climate movement, which has for whatever reason very decisively hitched its wagon to the optics of wind/solar, won’t particularly like it.
I’ve seen the same idea elsewhere, conveyed in somewhat different terms, such as this Twitter thread from Wesley Yang.
I might be wrong. The climate movement might prove adaptive and flexible to the coming moment. Perhaps, once they’re convinced fusion can actually work (totally fair, at this stage, to still be skeptical), they’ll start using their considerable political-amplification infrastructure to help the innovation process along at a political register. That would certainly be helpful. (And maybe they’ll set aside their erstwhile dreams of turning the entire North Sea into a wind farm, the entire Sahara into a mirror, and so forth.)
They might do that. But here’s the issue: we’re already seeing who commands the potential World of Fusion: the physics genius, the engineering uber-nerd, the Muskean entrepreneur, the Thielian investor-guru. The Cambridgeport “startup” which is kinda sorta stealing from MIT (but in an honest way!). I think that’s a world where the status, the moral authority, of the green activist, the activist in general, goes down.
Now, it’s true enough that a World of Renewables also requires engineers and tech entrepreneurs and this kind of thing—but the physics, engineering and experimentation required in that scenario are all far less advanced than is the case for fusion. Fusion is alchemy at a level that swings power to the alchemists. Expect a return to the dynamic of “Richard Feynman as cultural hero” as opposed to “Greta Thunberg as cultural hero.” Expect the whole dynamic, which is the prevailing dynamic today, where universities censure geophysicists for being publicly in favor of the idea of merit-based selection into scientific laboratories, to be tossed out, gone, vanished like it never happened.
(In the World of Windmills and Solar, where the energy alchemy isn’t that complex, the status of the sciences can be pushed sufficiently downward that it becomes acceptable for “politics” rather than intellectual merit to determine staffing decisions. Not so in a world where scientists are are creating artificial stars to give us infinite clean free energy. Anyone who has created their own star is going to have total control over who they hire and why.)
Another way of thinking about this: the activist, green or green-adjacent, can claim, quite credibly, to be one of the “authors” of the World of Renewables; they cannot really claim to be one of the authors of the World of Fusion. To use Bruno Latour’s terms, the activist is very much a part of the Renewable actor-network. But the activist is not part of the Fusion actor-network.
I guess my advice to the greens is: remember what winds up happening to Eli Sunday, who didn’t swallow his pride at the critical moment when it became empirically obvious that it was time to do so. Don’t be like Eli Sunday. (Keeping this vague because I don’t want to spoiler the best film of this century.)
On the transportation front (the thing I’m somewhat qualified to theorize about; in the World of Fusion I myself would certainly be down-status compared to the fusion engineers): fusion means an expended electrical grid, since the electricity on that grid would be ultra-clean and quasi-free. In the World of Fusion, anything that has trouble plugging into that grid begins to look awkward, clunky, obsolete, not “futuristic.” Maritime ships can’t easily plug into that grid. Neither can airplanes. Electric cars can plug into it, at least intermittently at charging stations. But what transportation type is perfect, in terms of its entire mechanical-infrastructural logic, for plugging into an electrical grid? Trains! Because trains are themselves grid-based and grid-reliant. So an expanded, quasi-free, fusion-powered electrical grid begins to make intercontinental train networks look more sensible as the primary transportative fulcrum of the global economy than intercontinental maritime shipping networks.
A trans-Bering sea bridge, already technically feasible, starts to look smarter for shipping freight between the hemispheres than having constant maritime shipping traffic on the sea lanes. Toss in rail seabridges at a few other critical straits (Gibraltar, Malacca, Sunda, Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Korea Strait), and most of the world is now linked to a fusion powered freight rail network (though Australia and NZ are excluded). To go back to Latour, the fusion actor-network gives birth to a train actor-network which gives birth to a train sea-bridge actor-network. Trains will loom large in the World of Fusion in a way they don’t currently, and didn’t even in the 19th century.
Pretty neat.
I don’t think it’s at all clear yet whether fusion energy is practical within the lifetime of anyone now living. From what I understand we are much much further away from practical commercial use than these excited press releases might lead an outside observer to think. For the past 35+ years, going back to the 80s, I have been seeing these occasional bursts of excitement about fusion and they never seem to lead anywhere
Are the activists really "writing" the World of Renewables? Or is it capital? This was taken up in a recent LRB article on the wind farm supply chain, where politics has completely failed to win any concessions from "green" capital in the UK: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/james-meek/who-holds-the-welding-rod
Since the infrastructure required by renewables is so capital intensive, this shouldn't be surprising. It is less clear what the infrastructure required for fusion looks like and how it might be capitalized on. You get clues from the FT article at what this might look like: a subscriber model where municipalities or corporations rent one of this "shipping container-size" fusion reactors, allowing them to circumvent the grid entirely (splintering infrastructure and creating fusion enclaves). I don't think Peter Thiel is interested necessarily in cheap clean energy provision, but rather a mode of energy production that can produce billionaires at the same clip of other silicon valley sectors.
While fusion is indeed "pretty neat," it's hard not to be cynical and think about how capital will immediately seize on it as a fix, and there will be no attendant disruption to the social order by this incredible new form of "alchemy".