5 ms·

"Consequently, a few decades hence energy may be free—just like the unmetered air—with coal and oil used mainly as raw materials for organic chemical synthesis,

"Consequently, a few decades hence energy may be free—just like the unmetered air—with coal and oil used mainly as raw materials for organic chemical synthesis, to which, as experience has shown, their properties are best suited." I am wondering why this prediction is so off given how other ones are spot on? How the situation back then made John von Neumann believe it, and what happened differently, moving this into the realms of fantasy. Perhaps if an another effort of a scale of the Manhattan Project had happened, the concept of the "free energy" would have been more realistic.

tim58 7y ago
This was before Chernobyl, and without Chernobyl the industrialized world would probably be mainly on nuclear fission power by now. This was also at a time when nuclear fusion energy was theoretically possible but before half a century of research has labeled the problem 'very hard'.
jaysonelliot 7y ago
"Too cheap to meter" was a common assumption about the future of nuclear power when it first began. If you only look at the amount of power available based on the raw materials, it's a reasonable prediction. They simply didn't take into account all of the associated costs and complexities that would be involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not to mention the political and social complications. That doesn't mean such a future can never happen, it's theoretically possible. We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy.
- DanBC 7y ago
  > We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy. ...and the fact we have about 4bn more people here than we did in 1960.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    We have far fewer people than growth rate at the time suggested; IIRC, around that time growth was viewed as exponential with a doubling period of ~35 years, had it continued the population would be 10.74 bn now, nearly 1.5× what it. So, no, population (at least high population) isn't something that was unforeseen.
- damidekronik 7y ago
  Yea, that is of my understanding too. There was no need for any great advance in that matter at the time. Now however, the situation is different, and yet, not as pressing as the global conflict back then to fund another "Los Alamos".
- rayiner 7y ago
  They didn’t expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. We may have had hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate change.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > They didn’t expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. The regulation is basically a liability shield and subsidy, the industry wants more, not less, of it to build plants.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      That doesn’t mean that regulation doesn’t impede innovation, e.g. by eliminating the incentive to adopt safer cycles. Moreover, the onerous review of reactor designs means there is a high incentive to stick with older designs that have already been reviewed by the government. (Thats a double whammy, because it makes newer, safer designs harder to deploy while reducing the incentive to deploy them.)
  - dctoedt 7y ago
    > If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. We may have had hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate change. And if wishes were horses .... It's hard to imagine how any democratic society could have gotten past the salience bias to make that happen. (Also, there's the better-the-devil-you-know familiarity bias working in coal's favor, to say nothing of the political influence of voters depending directly or indirectly on coal for their livelihoods.) EDIT: This also brought to mind the trolley problem [0], with the added wrinkle that it's not possible to predict with any confidence which specific persons would actually be injured or killed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I wonder if they had the 'capacity paradox' in mind, where the more you can have, you more you will use. In the 50s energy usage were quite minuscule compared to today I think.
Spooky23 7y ago
Demand increased dramatically. If federal mortgage rules empathized solar, you’d see near free energy production in residential in a decade or two.
n-exploit 7y ago
Within the U.S. - we live in a profit-maximizing capitalist structure. Why would any economic entity give something away for free when a profit can be made?
- al3xandre 7y ago
  Competition pushing price down to a near-zero cost base? like the $1 microcontroller you can buy today.
  - hhh 7y ago
    or the one cent microcontroller you can buy today.
  - n-exploit 7y ago
    The difference between zero and non-zero cost, no matter how low, is extreme.
CamouflagedKiwi 7y ago
Sounds a bit like the Jevons paradox - we improve the efficiency of energy consumption, but it does not result in it being free, because demand increases to counter.
philipkglass 7y ago
He made other incorrect predictions in the same document. We continue to (incidentally and carelessly) change the climate, but have yet to achieve anything like the reliably controllable weather he anticipated. He also incorrectly anticipated that atomic transmutation of the elements would become a bigger trend than chemical rearrangement of existing elements. "It is worth emphasizing that the main trend will be systematic exploration of nuclear reactions — that is, the transmutation of elements, or alchemy rather than chemistry." As for why he was mistaken about nuclear power, it's possible that he was extrapolating from the fantastically rapid progress of nuclear weapons technology. Fission was demonstrated in 1938, the first chain reaction in 1942, the first fission weapon in 1945. The first megaton scale thermonuclear explosion was demonstrated in 1952 and serial production of thermonuclear weapons began in 1954. Between 1944 and 1954 the explosive power of the largest military bombs went up by a factor of roughly two million [1] [2]. There was a 2300-fold leap from Grand Slam to Little Boy (6.5 tons TNT equivalent to 15 kilotons) and another thousand-fold leap from Little Boy to Castle Bravo (15 kilotons to 15 megatons). The challenges of making useful power reactors for electricity production are much different. Civilian power reactors have to compete with other electricity sources on cost. They have to produce power for decades rather than a fraction of a second. They are expected to fully contain fission products rather than disperse them widely as fallout. Recall that at the time of this writing, 1955, no country had yet built a power reactor comparable in output to large coal or hydroelectric plants. There had only been some small demonstrations like the 2 megawatts of electricity produced by the BORAX-III reactor. The actual difficulties to be encountered at larger scales were not yet known. Finally, "affordable" electricity was a moving target. In constant dollars, large American industrial buyers were paying 40% less per megawatt hour in 1970 than they were in 1950 [3]. Concerns about acutely hazardous air pollution were not yet widespread enough to justify a cost premium over fossil-generated power. Widespread concerns about greenhouse gas emissions were even further off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb [3] https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/histstats-colonial-1970.pdf https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/histstats-colonial-1970.p... - page 827
carapace 7y ago
The sequestration of atomic technology (not just power) is one of the rare areas where the interests of the good guys and bad guys coincide. Energy is free: we have a fusion generator that runs 24/7 with no maintenance and is so powerful it can burn out your retinas from 150 million kilometers away.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  we have Hypothetical: if aliens started building a Dyson sphere around Sol, could we stop them?
  - carapace 7y ago
    Insufficient data.

tim58 7y ago

This was before Chernobyl, and without Chernobyl the industrialized world would probably be mainly on nuclear fission power by now. This was also at a time when nuclear fusion energy was theoretically possible but before half a century of research has labeled the problem 'very hard'.

jaysonelliot 7y ago

"Too cheap to meter" was a common assumption about the future of nuclear power when it first began. If you only look at the amount of power available based on the raw materials, it's a reasonable prediction. They simply didn't take into account all of the associated costs and complexities that would be involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not to mention the political and social complications. That doesn't mean such a future can never happen, it's theoretically possible. We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy.

DanBC 7y ago
> We're simply in a place right now where it's hard to imagine with our current level of technology and our current energy economy. ...and the fact we have about 4bn more people here than we did in 1960.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  We have far fewer people than growth rate at the time suggested; IIRC, around that time growth was viewed as exponential with a doubling period of ~35 years, had it continued the population would be 10.74 bn now, nearly 1.5× what it. So, no, population (at least high population) isn't something that was unforeseen.
damidekronik 7y ago
Yea, that is of my understanding too. There was no need for any great advance in that matter at the time. Now however, the situation is different, and yet, not as pressing as the global conflict back then to fund another "Los Alamos".
rayiner 7y ago
They didn’t expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. We may have had hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate change.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > They didn’t expect that government regulation would kill innovation in the nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. The regulation is basically a liability shield and subsidy, the industry wants more, not less, of it to build plants.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    That doesn’t mean that regulation doesn’t impede innovation, e.g. by eliminating the incentive to adopt safer cycles. Moreover, the onerous review of reactor designs means there is a high incentive to stick with older designs that have already been reviewed by the government. (Thats a double whammy, because it makes newer, safer designs harder to deploy while reducing the incentive to deploy them.)
- dctoedt 7y ago
  > If nuclear plants had not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant, clean power today. We may have had hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate change. And if wishes were horses .... It's hard to imagine how any democratic society could have gotten past the salience bias to make that happen. (Also, there's the better-the-devil-you-know familiarity bias working in coal's favor, to say nothing of the political influence of voters depending directly or indirectly on coal for their livelihoods.) EDIT: This also brought to mind the trolley problem [0], with the added wrinkle that it's not possible to predict with any confidence which specific persons would actually be injured or killed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
agumonkey 7y ago
I wonder if they had the 'capacity paradox' in mind, where the more you can have, you more you will use. In the 50s energy usage were quite minuscule compared to today I think.

Spooky23 7y ago

Demand increased dramatically. If federal mortgage rules empathized solar, you’d see near free energy production in residential in a decade or two.

n-exploit 7y ago

Within the U.S. - we live in a profit-maximizing capitalist structure. Why would any economic entity give something away for free when a profit can be made?

al3xandre 7y ago
Competition pushing price down to a near-zero cost base? like the $1 microcontroller you can buy today.
- hhh 7y ago
  or the one cent microcontroller you can buy today.
- n-exploit 7y ago
  The difference between zero and non-zero cost, no matter how low, is extreme.

CamouflagedKiwi 7y ago

Sounds a bit like the Jevons paradox - we improve the efficiency of energy consumption, but it does not result in it being free, because demand increases to counter.

philipkglass 7y ago

He made other incorrect predictions in the same document. We continue to (incidentally and carelessly) change the climate, but have yet to achieve anything like the reliably controllable weather he anticipated. He also incorrectly anticipated that atomic transmutation of the elements would become a bigger trend than chemical rearrangement of existing elements. "It is worth emphasizing that the main trend will be systematic exploration of nuclear reactions — that is, the transmutation of elements, or alchemy rather than chemistry." As for why he was mistaken about nuclear power, it's possible that he was extrapolating from the fantastically rapid progress of nuclear weapons technology. Fission was demonstrated in 1938, the first chain reaction in 1942, the first fission weapon in 1945. The first megaton scale thermonuclear explosion was demonstrated in 1952 and serial production of thermonuclear weapons began in 1954. Between 1944 and 1954 the explosive power of the largest military bombs went up by a factor of roughly two million [1] [2]. There was a 2300-fold leap from Grand Slam to Little Boy (6.5 tons TNT equivalent to 15 kilotons) and another thousand-fold leap from Little Boy to Castle Bravo (15 kilotons to 15 megatons). The challenges of making useful power reactors for electricity production are much different. Civilian power reactors have to compete with other electricity sources on cost. They have to produce power for decades rather than a fraction of a second. They are expected to fully contain fission products rather than disperse them widely as fallout. Recall that at the time of this writing, 1955, no country had yet built a power reactor comparable in output to large coal or hydroelectric plants. There had only been some small demonstrations like the 2 megawatts of electricity produced by the BORAX-III reactor. The actual difficulties to be encountered at larger scales were not yet known. Finally, "affordable" electricity was a moving target. In constant dollars, large American industrial buyers were paying 40% less per megawatt hour in 1970 than they were in 1950 [3]. Concerns about acutely hazardous air pollution were not yet widespread enough to justify a cost premium over fossil-generated power. Widespread concerns about greenhouse gas emissions were even further off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb [3] https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/histstats-colonial-1970.pdf https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/histstats-colonial-1970.p... - page 827

carapace 7y ago

The sequestration of atomic technology (not just power) is one of the rare areas where the interests of the good guys and bad guys coincide. Energy is free: we have a fusion generator that runs 24/7 with no maintenance and is so powerful it can burn out your retinas from 150 million kilometers away.

jodrellblank 7y ago
we have Hypothetical: if aliens started building a Dyson sphere around Sol, could we stop them?
- carapace 7y ago
  Insufficient data.