For the most part I agree with your opinion of technological advancement with 2 addendums. In reality it is nuanced but in my experience there are a lot of areas of low hanging fruit limited only by the number of well informed people interested in the subject. This is modified by access to capital. To me it seems a personality trait of well informed people, that they are not as interested in searching or building capital. Secondly, the regulatory environment, I strongly believe that regulation slows down both tech building and research in general, I also think that for the most part it is a necessary evil just that we should be able to acknowledge that it is a double edged sword. I think this leaves us in the STEM fields with the unfortunate truth that at the end day regardless of how efficient of a turbine you design or how clever of an app you dream up, if you cannot convince people to buy the darn thing it's an intellectual dead end.
I can't really engage with the main question of your post ie. which institutions should get access to a technology? I'll only add that I understand the support for the idea of free flow of information and also get that rosy philanthropic feeling but that ideas usually benefit from an early monopoly. The chance at a payoff someday channels capital which builds up to a point of ‘critical mass’ before it can displace the status quo. With this understanding, I would say that perhaps the best institutions are those with the capital and will to follow through on bringing a new technology to fruition. I am leaving out the hard decision if the technology poses a risk to humanity of course but that is above my paygrade I guess.
Also as an aside, what is your interpretation of the Bill Gates article? I see no particular evidence of a lack of physics knowledge, are you referring to the take about the water comments or? It's definitely not an in-depth description of the problems with PWRs or BWRs, but I think is an acceptable explanation of the advantages of using LMRs. Maybe there is some other comment I am missing, but it comes across as an easily accessible article written to persuade the layman of the benefits of his endeavor?
Anyway very interesting post overall, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
To me it seems a personality trait of well informed people, that they are not as interested in searching or building capital.
Yes, there's a tradeoff between putting effort into research and putting it into "hustle", and usually people specialize in doing one. But it's not like "ability to partner with someone who searches for capital" is the real bottleneck. I'd say instead that there are certain people in the position to raise capital, but they have to believe in the technology and pitch it themselves, and they need to be on the same wavelength as people like Bill Gates and the moral maze masters, and the people in those positions who can communicate with investors are more likely to be delusional than to understand technology really well.
Also as an aside, what is your interpretation of the Bill Gates article? I see no particular evidence of a lack of physics knowledge, are you referring to the take about the water comments or? It's definitely not an in-depth description of the problems with PWRs or BWRs, but I think is an acceptable explanation of the advantages of using LMRs. Maybe there is some other comment I am missing, but it comes across as an easily accessible article written to persuade the layman of the benefits of his endeavor?
Sure, I can explain.
First, water isn’t very good at absorbing heat—it turns to steam and stops absorbing heat at just 100 degrees C
Water is actually rather good at absorbing heat. It has a much higher heat capacity than sodium, boiling absorbs a lot of heat if you boil it, and in a typical BWR design it boils at 285 C.
The Natrium plant uses liquid sodium, whose boiling point is more than 8 times higher than water’s
Gates is using unspecified temperature units and pressure, presumably Celcius at 1 bar. Divisions of temps in C aren't meaningful - does water have -3x the boiling point of ammonia?
Unlike water, the sodium doesn’t need to be pumped, because as it gets hot, it rises, and as it rises, it cools off
Water does that too. It's an almost universal property of liquids. You can do natural convection cooling with water.
Safety isn’t the only reason I’m excited about the Natrium design
The TerraPower Natrium design is much less safe than current reactors, and using sodium does nothing to improve safety. The sodium reduces reactivity so if the coolant boils off then reactivity increases. That's bad. The neutrons are fast so neutron lifetime is short so response time needs to be fast. That's bad. IIRC the design still involves robots moving fuel rods around during operation. That can fail.
It's just a really terrible design. Bad safety, and very expensive design decisions. Supposedly in the future they plan to use a "Pascal" heavy water moderated CO2 cooled reactor, which I always considered a better approach, but I have little faith in TerraPower doing a good job on it.
Like other power plant designs, it uses heat to turn water into steam, which moves a turbine, which generates electricity. ... It also includes an energy storage system that will allow it to control how much electricity it produces at any given time.
If you're using steam, the low-pressure steam turbines are big and have a lot of inertia compared to the low-pressure steam going through them, so they take a long time to spin up. That's a big reason why coal plants aren't load-following like gas turbines.
They're also expensive, so you really want to avoid them for cost reasons, and if you do have them you want to run them all the time. So with natural gas, the combined cycle plants with steam turbines also tend to run continuously.
I actually think gates’ article was pretty reasonable and don’t think you should read as much into it as you are. To be fair, I’m not a physicist, and don’t know anything about this tech and very little about nuclear reactors in general, so I might phrase some of my objections as questions back to you.
Part of the reason I think it’s reasonable is that it’s marketing material more than anything, and if you give him the benefit of the doubt on his exact phrasing, or interpret in the context he means, then there’s rational explanations.
Gates is using unspecified temperature units and pressure, presumably Celcius at 1 bar. Divisions of temps in C aren't meaningful - does water have -3x the boiling point of ammonia?
Oh, why is absolute zero relative at all? In this case, i think it’s 8x higher than water when using normal outdoor temps as baseline, which actually seems like a useful measurement in this application, no?
Unlike water, the sodium doesn’t need to be pumped, because as it gets hot, it rises, and as it rises, it cools off Water does that too. It's an almost universal property of liquids. You can do natural convection cooling with water
I thought he was saying that, in this application, water would boil before it rises away to be cooled. Anyway, do most applications of water based cooling in nuclear plants use pumps? Does natrium?
The TerraPower Natrium design is much less safe than current reactors, and using sodium does nothing to improve safety.
I guess I don’t know your background, but why do you believe yourself over them? Im not saying everyone should always trust the experts, but you should have reason to believe you’re better than them at least.
If nothing else, a disagreement on what’s safe in an incredibly complicated system with lots of disagreement out there should probably not cause us to update negatively on Gates’ ability.
8x higher than water when using normal outdoor temps as baseline, which actually seems like a useful measurement in this application
No. With unspecified units, that's saying (energy - x) of sodium = 8 * (energy - x) of water. For celcius, x = 273.15.
I thought he was saying that, in this application, water would boil before it rises away to be cooled.
There are nuclear plant designs using natural convection with water for emergency cooling.
I guess I don’t know your background, but why do you believe yourself over them?
Because when I look up my half-assed ideas they're often close to what people use today or what people on the cutting edge are researching. Because when I get to talk to people involved in things, I can tell how smart they are relative to me.
a disagreement on what’s safe in an incredibly complicated system with lots of disagreement out there
These are not disagreements among serious nuclear engineers. Gates just found a bunch of clowns instead.
No. With unspecified units, that's saying (energy - x) of sodium = 8 * (energy - x) of water. For celcius, x = 273.15.
I don’t think you understood my point, but I was a little wrong anyway. Turns out bill gates was close enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower
Sodium offers a 785-Kelvin temperature range between its solid and gaseous states, nearly 8x that of water's 100-Kelvin range.
There are nuclear plant designs using natural convection with water for emergency cooling.
ok? Was he trying to compare with those designs? Or the ones that caused deaths?
Because when I look up my half-assed ideas they're often close to what people use today or what people on the cutting edge are researching.
This is poor evidence and exactly the same as people who have deja vu saying they can predict the future. You’ve probably been exposed to those ideas and forgot that you were exposed to them.
Because when I get to talk to people involved in things, I can tell how smart they are relative to me.
Also poor evidence. You’re trusting your gut? How do you know it’s right? Most people are biased to believe they’re smarter and you seem to place a lot of value on it, so I imagine it also applies here.
These are not disagreements among serious nuclear engineers. Gates just found a bunch of clowns instead.
Have you heard a respected physicist make this claim? Or is it just a judgment you’ve made? Because it’s sounding like a no-true-Scotsman argument to me.
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This is getting a little nit picky so I’ll back off here. Maybe you are as smart as you claim and bill gates is as dumb as you claim. So far none of the evidence you’ve provided moves me at all.
Thinking about designs for new technology is something of a hobby of mine. For simple examples, you can see this battery design or some of my blog posts. Even if you can't come up with something useful (and you probably can't) having a problem in mind is a good way to guide your learning about a field.
Whether or not my designs are good isn't the point of this post. It's a general question about what LW members think that people outside major institutions should be working on, and who would deserve access to things if they were actually interested. (I'm just a generalist, as half-assed as Eratosthenes, but there are presumably people in some private communities as smart as me but specialized.)
It shouldn't be surprising that big companies and big university labs aren't that interested in pursuing outside ideas that they can't take credit for. Getting new ideas implemented requires specific conditions, which is why inventions don't usually get implemented until they're obvious enough that a bunch of people think of them. But before you start trying to find a way to get some institution to use your invention, you should probably figure out if you should be trying to give/sell it to that particular institution. What's the point of new technology if it just gives institutions more room to be corrupt, right? My view is that modern technology and weak competition have relaxed constraints on some institutions, and resulted in them being unusually bad by historical standards. For example:
This is a question I don't often see public debate about. Some people think of technological developments as natural events like rainstorms. Other people think of the progress of science as research in a Civilization game, where money and PhD-hours are used to fill up the requisite number of beakers with Science Fluid. But at least in my opinion, the limiting factor is usually "smart people trying to work on the problem", and smart people have some ability to decide what to work on.
Most of the time, when people suggest a topic to work on, one of the following applies:
Yes, forum-posters tend to suggest stupid stuff like "you should work on a nuclear reactor that uses thorium" or "try to find some single chemical that fixes aging". Most people don't understand the shape of the current technological frontier, let alone the shape of what's plausibly feasible, but let's be real: neither do the high-level officials and executives determining what programs to direct research money into. A vote to spend billions of dollars on something silly instead of hydrogen fuel research isn't really any worse, and at least it's democratic. And the people here are smart, right?
Anyway, I'm curious what technologies the people here think should get some more design work done, and what institutions they (you) think should get those designs if they were interested. Designing stuff is just a hobby of mine, but it's somehow more fun if it seems like somebody would deserve to have it. If you can't think of any technologies, here are some hypothetical examples: