“Energy Matters”

In the end, Zeus was right.

When he punished Prometheus for giving fire to humanity, the old Greek god must have known that their days are now numbered. In popular culture we believe that the Promethean fire symbolizes technology and knowledge, but I believe it is much simpler.

The laptop class has rediscovered a basic truth: foundational innovation, once adoption proceeds at scale, is followed by an epic increase in energy consumption. It’s an iron law of our universe.

To illustrate that law, consider three recent examples, all vectors leading to the “shocking” discovery of radical increases in expected electricity demand, now occupying headlines today. First, there’s the electric car, which, if there were one in every garage, as enthusiasts hope, would roughly double residential neighborhood electricity demands. Next, there’s the idea of repatriating manufacturing, especially for semiconductors. This is arguably a “foundational innovation,” since policymakers are suddenly showing concern over the decades-long exit of such industries from the U.S. Restoring American manufacturing to, say, the global market share of just two decades ago would see industrial electricity demand soar by 50 percent.

The nuclear industry is seeking to establish a beachhead in Canada’s North – literally – with a proposed floating nuclear power plant to serve remote Indigenous communities.

Westinghouse, a U.S.-based reactor vendor, has partnered with Prodigy Clean Energy, a Montreal-based company, to develop a transportable nuclear power plant. Essentially a barge housing one or more of Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactors, it would be built in a shipyard and moved thousands of kilometres by a heavy-lift carrier to its destination in the Far North. There it could be moored within a protected harbour, or installed on land near the shore.

Don’t get me wrong I’m on Team Godzilla.

Another foreign visit, another plea for Canadian liquified natural gas unanswered. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who was in Canada March 24 and 25, got the same cool reception that his peers from Japan and Germany in their calls for Canadian liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.

Why the indifference? Enter the dreaded rhetoric of the Canadian “business case,” the habit in domestic policy discourse to dismiss LNG exports to Europe as unviable — despite repeated asks from Europeans themselves.

If we want to rely on nuclear fusion to power the world’s homes, the first step is making reactors that can run as hot and as long as possible.

Now, an experimental reactor called KSTAR in Daejeon, Korea, has set a new world record.

The massive doughnut-shaped device, which has been dubbed ‘Korea’s artificial sun’ ran at 100 million°C (180 million°F) for 48 seconds.

Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade. Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.

Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.