I did not list one of the potential advantages of cold fusion in my
book: it would give us the ability to scale down some technology to
ensure that no machine is too big to fail. I did not want to list
that because it is a complicated idea and also off-putting, or
negative. I wanted to keep a positive tone. Apart from the sections
describing how robot chickens might swarm over crowds of people
shooting them in the head at close range.
What I have in mind is illustrated by the difference between a
conventional large-scale electric power plant and a wind farm. At a
power plant, you have a few gigantic turbines. If one turbine fails
for some reason and goes off-line, even if is a minor problem, you
are still in trouble because lose a large fraction of your total
generator capacity. You lose ~1 GW. On the other hand if one wind
turbine shorts out and burns, or the tower collapses, you lose ~1 MW.
The other turbines stay on line. With smaller-scale technology, the
worst damage from a catastrophic failure is limited. I have read the
Boeing and others have hesitated to build aircraft that can seat
~1,000 people partly because a crash would kill so many people at one
time. It is bad enough losing 400 people.
Naturally, the Gulf oil crisis brings this to mind. It is technology
that turned out to be too big, and too far beyond our control. I
think any reader here, and anyone familiar with machines and
technology, will know that you cannot expect perfection. You cannot
demand there be no accidents, or that no machine ever fails. We all
know that we must live with things like airplane crashes and even the
possibility of another Three Mile Island partial meltdown, but we
should live with these risks because the damage they cause is
reasonably limited, and the benefits outweigh the costs.
In the case of Gulf oil disaster, I was shocked to learn how
ill-prepared the experts were. They did not have enough backup plans.
Some of the experts turned out to be . . . inexpert, to put it
politely. Apparently, when BP was constructing the first gigantic cap
for the well, some geologists experts from other oil companies were
warning them that it would not work because hydrate ice would form
and block the pipe. You'd think they would know that! Perhaps the
experts disagreed about whether that would happen or not.
The larger issue is that it seems no expert imagined that a
catastrophic failure of this magnitude could occur. No one was
prepared to fix it. They did not anticipate the worst case scenario
or know how bad it might be. The damage appears to be gigantic. These
are the hallmarks of a technology that has gotten out of hand, and
beyond our control.
Anyway, I hope that cold fusion can be used to limit the size and
capacity of most energy sources, keeping them no larger than they
need to be in order to do the job at hand. Energy sources for a steel
mill or a large airplane will still need to be large, but we will not
have anything on the scale of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant
getting knocked off line for a couple of years by an earthquake, or a
flow of oil in the middle of the ocean amounting 40,000 bbl per day
-- or 35,000, or 60,000 bbl, or whatever the heck it turns out it is.
The fact that the World's Top Experts cannot even gauge the flow rate
is another indication that this technology is beyond our control.
As I said in the book cold fusion would eliminate the power
distribution network, which drastically lowers the cost of energy,
but as I did not say, it also limits the maximum size of an
out-of-control generator explosion, and it limits the disruption from
the equipment failure.
I am assuming here that cold fusion cannot be used to make nuclear
bombs. If it can then all bets are off and it is the most dangerous
technology ever discovered. Martin Fleischmann worried it might have
weapons applications, and wanted to keep it secret. I recall Russ
George expressed some fears about that . . .
Anyway, assuming cold fusion cannot go boom, it can be used to scale
things down. Or not. That would be up to the product designer. It
could also be used to scale things up, perhaps unnecessarily. Or
unwisely, only in order to save money. Large-scale machines are often
attractive because they bring economies of scale. But they can also
cause problems that no one can anticipate or control. The Great
Eastern was a classic example. It was far too big to make money; it
turned out to be underpowered; one of the boilers exploded on an
early trip; and it was so big it went aground on an uncharted rock
off of Long Island (now listed as the Great Eastern Rock), and fixing
it called for extreme engineering legerdemain. Isambard Kingdom
Brunel was the classic example of a genius engineer who reached too
far and tried to accomplish too much.
- Jed
- [Vo]:We should build no machine too big to fail Jed Rothwell
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