Great article. I especially like your take on the evolution of society. You don't go with the usual hack of blaming all our troubles on some elite cabal of rich people playing puppet master. Your predictions looking out at the coming decades are not fantastical. We will evolve as our living situations change.
It's difficult to make predictions, especially if they're about the future;)
One of my more salient worries at this moment concerns our current global hegemon and how it may leave its 'privileged' position. Will it go into that good night peacefully?
Given the prevalence of socio-psychological pathologies amongst its ruling elite/decision-makers, I am highly doubtful that they will exit the world stage gracefully. I expect them to go out, literally, with a bang by using their expansive armoury in an attempt to control how this all plays out...
This is my biggest short-term fear. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it's very difficult for me to fathom the US not resorting to large-scale thermonuclear warfare if faced with an ignominious loss in either Ukraine or in a potential war with China over Taiwan. (I likewise presume that Russia and China would resort to nukes if they perceived an imminent existential defeat.)
I agree with pretty much everything you write, except for one small detail:
"...boiling the oceans just by the waste heat of our activities?"
I was under the impression that global warming has nothing to do with the excess heat generated from energy production, but rather the excess sunlight the Earth absorbs due to greenhouse gases.
Because of black body radiation, excess energy produced by humans simply radiates into space. What matters is the *equilibrium* between this radiation and the radiation recieved from the sun which is what global warming is all about.
Hi, a fine question indeed. Here I was referring to waste heat generated above and beyond solar irradiation, like nuclear fusion here on Earth for example. If this technology would be viable and could scale (which it neither can or will), it could generate additional heat and contribute to global warming even further.
Excellent article, but a bit too optimistic. You’re underestimating the international tensions and the social chaos that will surge when essential supplies are missing and when people go hungry.
I really appreciate the realism of your approach – imagining, in story form, a logical progression into the future based on factual present conditions & constraints. Speculative fiction has taken us on many rides into possible alternative futures, from Mary Shelley & HG Wells to Ministry for the Future, On The Beach and Don't Look Up. What I see here is different, and perhaps just what the doctor ordered for a population of privileged humans still not coming to terms with what's in store. So, as I'm reading I'm thinking... screenplay! People living through the unraveling of civilization and Nature in the coming decades is a story not yet told in film that I'm aware of. Film is a powerful medium that can captivate, inform & inferentially advise. To a much bigger audience. Have you considered the idea?
One other thing, If you expand your longer list of predicaments (May 2023) I suggest noting that the breakdown of the Earth System is irreversible. AMOC and Jet Stream stability will not be restored. Global ice loss will not be restored. Entropy. Wiping out the evolution of complexity.
You are losing me with this climate change nonsense ... I suppose you also believe we have put a man on the moon (right normy)..
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
"The fast breeder technology has the potential to make the production of energy from uranium 100 times more efficient than with the existing thermal reactor, reducing the amount and toxicity of radioactive waste, as well as the heat emanating from the waste, and also shortening the waste's hazardous lifetime span"
Fast-neutron reactors can potentially reduce the radiotoxicity of nuclear waste. Each commercial scale reactor would have an annual waste output of a little more than a ton of fission products, plus trace amounts of transuranics if the most highly radioactive components could be recycled. The remaining waste should be stored for about 500 years.
Wakey wakey! You need to read the link I gave above:-
"Fast breeder technology was developed in the 1960s with demonstration and prototype reactors operating in a number of countries, including China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. There are 12 experimental fast reactors and six commercial size prototypes with outputs from 250 - 1200 MW that have been constructed or are in operation..."
I try to imagine The Future, but without the Climate Catastrophism framework...
Most everything will be as you describe, but we'll have reverted to a feudalism like that
of the middle ages, and what fossil fuels remaining will be hoarded in service to the
technological control structure...
Something akin to what Orwell depicted in '1984' - wherein the main productive activity is the
re-production of control technology/apparatus (bureaucracy); wherein The Economy, what little of it exists, has lost it's Control function; and wherein consumers choices have whittled down to Cabbages ("There will always be Cabbage for Dinner !")
(I have objections to the 'ecological' Future depicted in Ernst Callenbach's 1975 novel 'Ecotopia', though it's one of the very few attempts to flesh-out a possible ecological based Future.)
Thank you B🙏
Great article. I especially like your take on the evolution of society. You don't go with the usual hack of blaming all our troubles on some elite cabal of rich people playing puppet master. Your predictions looking out at the coming decades are not fantastical. We will evolve as our living situations change.
It's difficult to make predictions, especially if they're about the future;)
One of my more salient worries at this moment concerns our current global hegemon and how it may leave its 'privileged' position. Will it go into that good night peacefully?
Given the prevalence of socio-psychological pathologies amongst its ruling elite/decision-makers, I am highly doubtful that they will exit the world stage gracefully. I expect them to go out, literally, with a bang by using their expansive armoury in an attempt to control how this all plays out...
This is my biggest short-term fear. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it's very difficult for me to fathom the US not resorting to large-scale thermonuclear warfare if faced with an ignominious loss in either Ukraine or in a potential war with China over Taiwan. (I likewise presume that Russia and China would resort to nukes if they perceived an imminent existential defeat.)
And in the meantime, mainstream media and government agencies are still selling us some very different dreams...
---------------------
Maybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and Then Mars
Through partnerships and 3-D printing, NASA is plotting how to build houses on the moon by 2040.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/realestate/nasa-homes-moon-3-d-printing.html
I'm 78 and repeatedly ask myself whether I'll go first or the world will.
Depressing but clear-eyed essay.
Hi B!
I agree with pretty much everything you write, except for one small detail:
"...boiling the oceans just by the waste heat of our activities?"
I was under the impression that global warming has nothing to do with the excess heat generated from energy production, but rather the excess sunlight the Earth absorbs due to greenhouse gases.
Because of black body radiation, excess energy produced by humans simply radiates into space. What matters is the *equilibrium* between this radiation and the radiation recieved from the sun which is what global warming is all about.
Or am I missing something?
Thanks for your work!
Hi, a fine question indeed. Here I was referring to waste heat generated above and beyond solar irradiation, like nuclear fusion here on Earth for example. If this technology would be viable and could scale (which it neither can or will), it could generate additional heat and contribute to global warming even further.
Excellent article, but a bit too optimistic. You’re underestimating the international tensions and the social chaos that will surge when essential supplies are missing and when people go hungry.
I really appreciate the realism of your approach – imagining, in story form, a logical progression into the future based on factual present conditions & constraints. Speculative fiction has taken us on many rides into possible alternative futures, from Mary Shelley & HG Wells to Ministry for the Future, On The Beach and Don't Look Up. What I see here is different, and perhaps just what the doctor ordered for a population of privileged humans still not coming to terms with what's in store. So, as I'm reading I'm thinking... screenplay! People living through the unraveling of civilization and Nature in the coming decades is a story not yet told in film that I'm aware of. Film is a powerful medium that can captivate, inform & inferentially advise. To a much bigger audience. Have you considered the idea?
One other thing, If you expand your longer list of predicaments (May 2023) I suggest noting that the breakdown of the Earth System is irreversible. AMOC and Jet Stream stability will not be restored. Global ice loss will not be restored. Entropy. Wiping out the evolution of complexity.
You are losing me with this climate change nonsense ... I suppose you also believe we have put a man on the moon (right normy)..
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
https://energyskeptic.com/2017/the-devils-scenario-near-miss-at-fukushima-is-a-warning-for-u-s/
The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16628547/
However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
So, are you are a fan of fast neutron reactors?
"The fast breeder technology has the potential to make the production of energy from uranium 100 times more efficient than with the existing thermal reactor, reducing the amount and toxicity of radioactive waste, as well as the heat emanating from the waste, and also shortening the waste's hazardous lifetime span"
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/fast-reactors-provide-sustainable-nuclear-power-thousands-years
Fast-neutron reactors can potentially reduce the radiotoxicity of nuclear waste. Each commercial scale reactor would have an annual waste output of a little more than a ton of fission products, plus trace amounts of transuranics if the most highly radioactive components could be recycled. The remaining waste should be stored for about 500 years.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsSA1205.pdf
Potentially ... wake me up when it happens.. it won't
Just like this wont
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181119-why-flammable-ice-could-be-the-future-of-energy
You are being played
Wakey wakey! You need to read the link I gave above:-
"Fast breeder technology was developed in the 1960s with demonstration and prototype reactors operating in a number of countries, including China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. There are 12 experimental fast reactors and six commercial size prototypes with outputs from 250 - 1200 MW that have been constructed or are in operation..."
Just like the experimental 'vaccines'... is it?
Check this out https://autoearth.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/AntarcticaSeaIce.jpg
I try to imagine The Future, but without the Climate Catastrophism framework...
Most everything will be as you describe, but we'll have reverted to a feudalism like that
of the middle ages, and what fossil fuels remaining will be hoarded in service to the
technological control structure...
Something akin to what Orwell depicted in '1984' - wherein the main productive activity is the
re-production of control technology/apparatus (bureaucracy); wherein The Economy, what little of it exists, has lost it's Control function; and wherein consumers choices have whittled down to Cabbages ("There will always be Cabbage for Dinner !")
(I have objections to the 'ecological' Future depicted in Ernst Callenbach's 1975 novel 'Ecotopia', though it's one of the very few attempts to flesh-out a possible ecological based Future.)