The Cosmopolicast

Some of you have asked me to put our podcasts on the RSS feed. I thought that happened automatically, but apparently it doesn’t. I think—but I’m not sure—that if I post the podcasts under the “Podcasts” tab, they’ll show up on the RSS feed. I’m trying this today with our first podcast with Dina Khapaeva, which I initially published along with this article:

* The West doesn’t realize how much danger it’s in: Dugin, The Third Empire, the Cult of Stalin, Neo-Medievalism, and the Sources of Russian Conduct: An Introduction to Dina Khapaeva.

Let me know if this works. I’m sorry for sending the link to absolutely everyone when it may only be a few of you who want it. But I assume that for everyone who wrote, another twenty had the same complaint. I hope this fixes the problem.

If you haven’t listened to this yet, today would be a good day, because later today I’ll be posting our second podcast with Dina. We take up where we leave off—with Dina’s suggestion that contemporary Russian society is haunted by the repressed and distorted memory of the Gulag. We discussed this and much more.

You don’t need to listen to this podcast to appreciate the next one, but it would help. Both are timely in light of Putin’s speech yesterday in which he announced a call-up of 300,000 reservists and (yet again) threatened to nuke us.

Overnight, I’ve seen an efflorescence of articles debating whether he means it. This discussion of Russian culture—and the ideology of the people who surround Putin—is worth considering if you’re trying to answer that question.

Dina’s recent article, Putin the Terrible, is an excellent compliment to the discussion.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Vladislav Davidzon was in Odessa last week. He at last managed to persuade his elderly father-in-law, a salty old sailor, to abandon the hooch in his garage and leave for Romania with him. When we spoke to them last night, they’d just finished the exhausting sixteen-hour journey from Odessa by taxi, ferry, bus, taxi, and train. Volunteers at the border told them they were the first refugees they’d seen carrying their art collection.

Vladislav has been doing superb reporting from Ukraine recently. I’ve put in a few links further down so you can watch his interviews and read his articles.

But when I finally got him on the phone last night, he didn’t feel like doing the same podcast about the war he’d already done fifteen times this week. He felt like talking about literature. So he invited Kate Tsurkan, who’s in Chernivtsi, to join us on the podcast.

Kate’s a writer, editor, translator, and editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian literary review apofenie. Kate and Vladislav co-wrote this article in Tablet about the six writers who are shaping the future of Ukrainian literature:

An old guard of contemporary Ukrainian writers such as Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan and Yuri Andrukhovych have become canonical and even world-renowned, but an intriguing new generation of young writers has also emerged in recent years. Some of these young writers are extraordinarily talented and seem as if they are about to have their moment in the West. The war has brought out the best in these established and emerging authors alike.

Kate recently wrote Cancer in a time of war: the Kyiv oncologists dispensing refuge and hope. We discussed this first, thinking a bit about the metaphorical richness of the subject. The podcast may get a little bit hard to follow at this point because Vlad’s father-in-law weighed in at some length but he doesn’t speak English.

This is Philharmonic Square in Chernivtsi. When Kate speaks of the beautiful Austro-Hungarian architecture, this is what she means:

Links

* apofenie

* A conversation among Yuri Andrukhovych, Norman Nawrocki, Bohdana Neborak, and Kate Tsurkan.

* Vasyl Stus: Life in Creativity

Vladislav discusses the mood in Odessa and the strike on the airport where his late mother-in-law worked. He praises the volunteers on the border and describes making the trip, repeatedly, to bring members of his family to safety:

Odessa locks down over fears of Putin’s saboteurs on painful anniversary. Monday marks the anniversary of a deadly clash between pro-Russian and pro-European activists in the city that killed 48 people and injured dozens more in 2014.

By Vasyl Stus

I wandered around the city of my youth,vainly searching, in the new blocks, for yesterday’s buildings, parks, and paths,  for familiar patterns on pediments,geography is lost.The city had become prettier and grown,new avenues had appeared, new hotels, streets,monuments, stadiums, and trees,yet not a single familiar face in the crowd, not a single facethat would evoke your vanished youth.I hoped at least to run into myself,right where the fountain flowed,hemmed by artificial marble.All in vain.Nothing.Disappeared without a trace. The light high-rises took off into the sky, and you so very small next to them,not visible even to yourself,let alone to passers-by. A taxi driver stopped his car and walked up to the fountain,which sprinkled wateron a gentle, unfamiliar poplar,he washed his hands,got out his handkerchief,carefully dried his palms,then got behind the wheel and sped off,leaving a little cloud of dust behind.Watching him drive away,I realized for the first time: I failed at life. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Vladislav Davidzon was in Odessa last week. He at last managed to persuade his elderly father-in-law, a salty old sailor, to abandon the hooch in his garage and leave for Romania with him. When we spoke to them last night, they’d just finished the exhausting sixteen-hour journey from Odessa by taxi, ferry, bus, taxi, and train. Volunteers at the border told them they were the first refugees they’d seen carrying their art collection.

Vladislav has been doing superb reporting from Ukraine recently. I’ve put in a few links further down so you can watch his interviews and read his articles.

But when I finally got him on the phone last night, he didn’t feel like doing the same podcast about the war he’d already done fifteen times this week. He felt like talking about literature. So he invited Kate Tsurkan, who’s in Chernivtsi, to join us on the podcast.

Kate’s a writer, editor, translator, and editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian literary review apofenie. Kate and Vladislav co-wrote this article in Tablet about the six writers who are shaping the future of Ukrainian literature:

An old guard of contemporary Ukrainian writers such as Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan and Yuri Andrukhovych have become canonical and even world-renowned, but an intriguing new generation of young writers has also emerged in recent years. Some of these young writers are extraordinarily talented and seem as if they are about to have their moment in the West. The war has brought out the best in these established and emerging authors alike.

Kate recently wrote Cancer in a time of war: the Kyiv oncologists dispensing refuge and hope. We discussed this first, thinking a bit about the metaphorical richness of the subject. The podcast may get a little bit hard to follow at this point because Vlad’s father-in-law weighed in at some length but he doesn’t speak English.

This is Philharmonic Square in Chernivtsi. When Kate speaks of the beautiful Austro-Hungarian architecture, this is what she means:

Links

* apofenie

* A conversation among Yuri Andrukhovych, Norman Nawrocki, Bohdana Neborak, and Kate Tsurkan.

* Vasyl Stus: Life in Creativity

Vladislav discusses the mood in Odessa and the strike on the airport where his late mother-in-law worked. He praises the volunteers on the border and describes making the trip, repeatedly, to bring members of his family to safety:

Odessa locks down over fears of Putin’s saboteurs on painful anniversary. Monday marks the anniversary of a deadly clash between pro-Russian and pro-European activists in the city that killed 48 people and injured dozens more in 2014.

By Vasyl Stus

I wandered around the city of my youth,vainly searching, in the new blocks, for yesterday’s buildings, parks, and paths,  for familiar patterns on pediments,geography is lost.The city had become prettier and grown,new avenues had appeared, new hotels, streets,monuments, stadiums, and trees,yet not a single familiar face in the crowd, not a single facethat would evoke your vanished youth.I hoped at least to run into myself,right where the fountain flowed,hemmed by artificial marble.All in vain.Nothing.Disappeared without a trace. The light high-rises took off into the sky, and you so very small next to them,not visible even to yourself,let alone to passers-by. A taxi driver stopped his car and walked up to the fountain,which sprinkled wateron a gentle, unfamiliar poplar,he washed his hands,got out his handkerchief,carefully dried his palms,then got behind the wheel and sped off,leaving a little cloud of dust behind.Watching him drive away,I realized for the first time: I failed at life. 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday we spoke to Vladislav Davidzon and Olga Tokariuk in Kyiv. You can download the podcast here or at the Cosmopolitan Globalist.

More by Vladislav at the Cosmopolitan Globalist:

LENINFALL AND THE GREAT DANE

The story of the Viking who defeated the Odessa mafia and erected a runestone.

ON MOSCOW’S OBJECTIVES

Ukrainian leaders visited Washington, D.C. The CIA and the Department of Defense gave them private briefings. They emerged deeply shaken.

WHAT MANAFORT’S PARDON TAUGHT US

Ukrainians may be dejected that Manafort has been sprung, but they’re not entitled to be. They relied on Americans to prosecute him instead of doing it themselves. If you want the law enforced in your country, you must prosecute your own criminals. That’s what sovereignty is all about.

Previous podcasts with Vladislav:

THE ANGELS AND DEMONS OF ODESSA

Vladislav Davidzon and David Patrikarakos regale the editors with Black Sea gossip and tales of heroic adventures.

THE COSMORUSSYACAST

It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a complete nuisance. Scott Abel joins us from Tallinn. Estonia’s former president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, reinforces the Estonian contingent from his lonely farmhouse in the Estonian countryside. Jon Nighswander (who began his career as a Russianist) joins us from Vienna.

Global Eyes, Ukraine edition

New intelligence suggests Russia plans a false flag operation to trigger an invasion of Ukraine. The intelligence was discussed in a White House meeting Thursday night and led to renewed calls for Americans to leave Ukraine immediately.

Russia and US evacuate diplomatic staff from Ukraine.

Facing maximum pressure from Russia, Zelensky refuses to blink.

US warns allies that Ukraine crisis puts post-World War II order at risk, will spread instability to the Indo-Pacific if unopposed.

Russia’s foreign ministry says talk of war is propaganda and “hysteria.”

Biden and Putin to speak as Ukraine warnings mount.

PUTIN’S PLAN:

It’s obvious what will happen, but how will it happen? Russia will invade Ukraine from the North, East, and South. There will be three operational thrusts, each commanded by one of Russia’s three army commands currently deployed near Ukraine:

* Kyiv Operation — 1st Guards Tank Army

* Dnieper Operation — 20th Guards Combined Arms Army

* Odessa Operation — 8th Guards Combined Arms Army

The Kyiv and Odessa Operations are the main thrusts, as control of Kyiv and a corridor from Russia to Transnistria are the primary operational aims. As for Ukrainian defense plans and preparations, known and assumed — none of them will be discussed here. No one wants to aid Putin and it is best if Russian soldiers only discover Ukrainian defense preparation once they find themselves under Ukrainian fire.

Before the invasion Russia will create a false-flag event as pretext: either Putin’s military will attack Russia or the Putin’s intelligence agencies will stage a chemical weapons attack in Donbas. Fittingly Putin’s defense minister Shoigu has already publicly blamed the CIA if the latter happens. Once Putin’s propaganda has videos of “Russian” corpses, then Russia’s military, coincidentally and conveniently already placed in combat readiness on Ukraine’s borders, will invade.

…

The operational details of Putin’s offensive as briefed in November and war-gamed in December:

… This is the maximal Russian invasion plan. Western militaries’ war games showed that Ukrainian forces have only minuscule chances to defeat Russian armored forces in an open battle, as Russian air supremacy will be massive. Ukraine’s chance to successfully fight Russia to standstill rests on Ukraine’s ability to activate, equip and disperse Ukrainian active and reserve forces quickly and effectively before Russia invades. It rests on Ukraine dispersing and camouflaging its forces to reduce the risk of losing entire battalions to Russian artillery and rocket strikes. It rests on Ukraine’s ability to deny Russia the use of its railways. It rests on Ukraine’s ability to ambush, isolate and destroy Russian units in detail. It rests on Ukraine’s ability to deny Russia the crossing of the Dnieper. It rests very much on the speed, amount and type of weapons the West delivers. It rests on the ability of Ukraine’s population to endure in the face of Russian bombardments and sieges. And it rest above all, as Finland showed in winter of 1940–41, on the Ukrainians ability to kill Russian soldiers: 10,000 is good; 50,000 is better; 100,000 dead Russian soldiers will bring peace.

The TikTok buildup: Videos reveal Russian forces closing in on Ukraine.

In northern Ukraine, fears of a Russian invasion shatter cross-border ties. Ukrainian insurgency units train in case Russia moves in; “We all used to be like brothers.”

Satellite images show Russia adding military pressure on Ukraine. “These images show either the biggest bluff in modern military history or an expression of Russia’s desire to show the world that they are preparing a military operation.” … “Until now, satellite images have shown divisions stationed in barracks, now, some of these soldiers have started to move towards the border. … The satellite photos also show, for the first time, “the installation of a field hospital …. ” Meanwhile Moscow continues to clear its eastern front as it moves troops towards the west, repatriating soldiers from as far as Siberia to Belarus. …

Rocket launchers on roads near Kursk:

⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇

What Happens When Russian Hackers Come for the Electrical Grid: “In late December, U.S. officials privately warned utilities they could be targeted if relations with Russia deteriorate, telling them their security teams shouldn’t take the holidays off, according to two people familiar with the briefing. On Jan. 11, US officials publicly called on utilities to comb their networks for signs of Russian intrusions.”

By Nicolas Tenzer: Discussions, dialogue or negotiation: Is it possible to deal with the Russian regime?

Water sausage update

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday we spoke to Vladislav Davidzon and Olga Tokariuk in Kyiv. You can download the podcast here or at the Cosmopolitan Globalist.

More by Vladislav at the Cosmopolitan Globalist:

LENINFALL AND THE GREAT DANE

The story of the Viking who defeated the Odessa mafia and erected a runestone.

ON MOSCOW’S OBJECTIVES

Ukrainian leaders visited Washington, D.C. The CIA and the Department of Defense gave them private briefings. They emerged deeply shaken.

WHAT MANAFORT’S PARDON TAUGHT US

Ukrainians may be dejected that Manafort has been sprung, but they’re not entitled to be. They relied on Americans to prosecute him instead of doing it themselves. If you want the law enforced in your country, you must prosecute your own criminals. That’s what sovereignty is all about.

Previous podcasts with Vladislav:

THE ANGELS AND DEMONS OF ODESSA

Vladislav Davidzon and David Patrikarakos regale the editors with Black Sea gossip and tales of heroic adventures.

THE COSMORUSSYACAST

It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a complete nuisance. Scott Abel joins us from Tallinn. Estonia’s former president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, reinforces the Estonian contingent from his lonely farmhouse in the Estonian countryside. Jon Nighswander (who began his career as a Russianist) joins us from Vienna.

Global Eyes, Ukraine edition

New intelligence suggests Russia plans a false flag operation to trigger an invasion of Ukraine. The intelligence was discussed in a White House meeting Thursday night and led to renewed calls for Americans to leave Ukraine immediately.

Russia and US evacuate diplomatic staff from Ukraine.

Facing maximum pressure from Russia, Zelensky refuses to blink.

US warns allies that Ukraine crisis puts post-World War II order at risk, will spread instability to the Indo-Pacific if unopposed.

Russia’s foreign ministry says talk of war is propaganda and “hysteria.”

Biden and Putin to speak as Ukraine warnings mount.

PUTIN’S PLAN:

It’s obvious what will happen, but how will it happen? Russia will invade Ukraine from the North, East, and South. There will be three operational thrusts, each commanded by one of Russia’s three army commands currently deployed near Ukraine:

* Kyiv Operation — 1st Guards Tank Army

* Dnieper Operation — 20th Guards Combined Arms Army

* Odessa Operation — 8th Guards Combined Arms Army

The Kyiv and Odessa Operations are the main thrusts, as control of Kyiv and a corridor from Russia to Transnistria are the primary operational aims. As for Ukrainian defense plans and preparations, known and assumed — none of them will be discussed here. No one wants to aid Putin and it is best if Russian soldiers only discover Ukrainian defense preparation once they find themselves under Ukrainian fire.

Before the invasion Russia will create a false-flag event as pretext: either Putin’s military will attack Russia or the Putin’s intelligence agencies will stage a chemical weapons attack in Donbas. Fittingly Putin’s defense minister Shoigu has already publicly blamed the CIA if the latter happens. Once Putin’s propaganda has videos of “Russian” corpses, then Russia’s military, coincidentally and conveniently already placed in combat readiness on Ukraine’s borders, will invade.

…

The operational details of Putin’s offensive as briefed in November and war-gamed in December:

… This is the maximal Russian invasion plan. Western militaries’ war games showed that Ukrainian forces have only minuscule chances to defeat Russian armored forces in an open battle, as Russian air supremacy will be massive. Ukraine’s chance to successfully fight Russia to standstill rests on Ukraine’s ability to activate, equip and disperse Ukrainian active and reserve forces quickly and effectively before Russia invades. It rests on Ukraine dispersing and camouflaging its forces to reduce the risk of losing entire battalions to Russian artillery and rocket strikes. It rests on Ukraine’s ability to deny Russia the use of its railways. It rests on Ukraine’s ability to ambush, isolate and destroy Russian units in detail. It rests on Ukraine’s ability to deny Russia the crossing of the Dnieper. It rests very much on the speed, amount and type of weapons the West delivers. It rests on the ability of Ukraine’s population to endure in the face of Russian bombardments and sieges. And it rest above all, as Finland showed in winter of 1940–41, on the Ukrainians ability to kill Russian soldiers: 10,000 is good; 50,000 is better; 100,000 dead Russian soldiers will bring peace.

The TikTok buildup: Videos reveal Russian forces closing in on Ukraine.

In northern Ukraine, fears of a Russian invasion shatter cross-border ties. Ukrainian insurgency units train in case Russia moves in; “We all used to be like brothers.”

Satellite images show Russia adding military pressure on Ukraine. “These images show either the biggest bluff in modern military history or an expression of Russia’s desire to show the world that they are preparing a military operation.” … “Until now, satellite images have shown divisions stationed in barracks, now, some of these soldiers have started to move towards the border. … The satellite photos also show, for the first time, “the installation of a field hospital …. ” Meanwhile Moscow continues to clear its eastern front as it moves troops towards the west, repatriating soldiers from as far as Siberia to Belarus. …

Rocket launchers on roads near Kursk:

⬇⬇⬇⬇⬇

What Happens When Russian Hackers Come for the Electrical Grid: “In late December, U.S. officials privately warned utilities they could be targeted if relations with Russia deteriorate, telling them their security teams shouldn’t take the holidays off, according to two people familiar with the briefing. On Jan. 11, US officials publicly called on utilities to comb their networks for signs of Russian intrusions.”

By Nicolas Tenzer: Discussions, dialogue or negotiation: Is it possible to deal with the Russian regime?

Water sausage update

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

From Claire—If you missed it, here’s the first part of today’s Cosmopolicast: Energy Week: Beyond Thunderdome. Today we begin in medias res, so be sure to listen to them in order; otherwise, you’ll have no idea who’s who or why we’re all so agitated.

Energy Week has expanded well beyond the original plan; we’re now nearing on an Energy Month with the debate nowhere near settled, our readers hurling invective at us, and the Cosmopolitan Globalists barely on speaking terms. We’ve been calling each other Nazis on Twitter; one of us even suggested the other suffers from insecurity about his—well, frankly, never mind. Who knew? I sure didn’t when I suggested this debate. The good news is that we’ve discovered our acrimony is combustible, renewable, and more powerful than any of us imagined, so all we need to do is figure out how to harness it. Then we’ll be able safely to power the whole world, as well as Mars, well into the twenty-fourth century.

Frankly, though, we’re sick of the bickering. So until we all chill out, the Cosmopolitan Globalist will be sticking to bland, uncontroversial topics such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and whether it’s appropriate to encourage your transgender two-year-old to transition.

But before that, we’ve got to wrap things up. So today, on a hopeful note, Owen Lewis describes the promise of fusion. Tomorrow, of course, will be consecrated to Beautiful Things. On Monday, Dr. X will offer a last word about climate science, since he promised to try to answer all your questions. He won’t be able to answer every last one of them, but he has some thoughts about the best strategy, scientifically and epistemologically, for answering questions these kinds of questions.

Vivek has a terrific essay for us in the works about the economics of the energy transition, but we may wait until after the debate to publish it. There are other things happening in India right now that even more urgently require Vivek’s attention.

On Tuesday, we’ll award the Grand Prize to the best debater, and it will be very grand indeed. So hold onto your hats, because the winner will be feted in true Cosmopolitan Globalist style.

How close are we to fusion power?

by Owen Lewis

Since the first laboratory demonstration of a fusion reaction in the early 1930s, scientists have been trying to figure out how to harness the kind of energy that powers the Sun and the stars. A fusion device that produces more power than required to sustain the reaction—a result called net energy—is the holy grail. The power would be clean, reliable, and inexhaustible. It would generate significantly more power per kilogram of fuel than any other source in our grasp, including nuclear fission. What’s more, it wouldn’t emit a drop of particulate matter, carbon dioxide, or any other noxious byproduct. So far, no one has managed it. But we’re closer than you might think.

Nuclear fusion and nuclear fission are significantly different. Both processes involve atoms, and both convert mass into energy, as described in Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. But to achieve nuclear fission, you bombard a large atom, like uranium, with high-speed particles to split it into smaller atoms, unleashing an enormous amount of energy in the process. To achieve nuclear fusion, however, you go the opposite direction: It occurs when two small atoms, like hydrogen, are fused into a larger one—again releasing significant energy.

It’s not quite that simple, of course. Almost all fusion in the Sun takes place as a result of what’s known as a proton-proton chain reaction. This begins with hydrogen. Hydrogen atoms are the most abundant in the universe and the simplest: just one proton and one electron. Take away the electron, and a hydrogen atom is a naked proton. The Sun’s searing heat ionizes hydrogen into protons, then the far more immense heat and pressure at the Sun’s core fuses them into helium, the second most common atom in the universe. In the process, a small amount of the mass of the original protons, just shy of one percent, is released as energy.

It would be impractical to replicate this on the Earth. So fusion reactors here won’t begin with hydrogen, but with its isotopes. Atoms are isotopes if they have the same number of protons in their nucleus but a different number of neutrons. Hydrogen has three isotopes, protium (usually just called hydrogen), deuterium, and tritium. Many planned fusion reactors will run on deuterium-tritium fuel, because it’s comparatively easy to work with; it fuses at a mere 150 million degrees K—only ten times hotter than our Sun’s core.

Deuterium is abundant. It can be extracted from seawater. Tritium is trickier. It’s extremely rare in nature. Indeed, our current supply of tritium is an estimated twenty kilos, all artificially produced in nuclear fission reactors. What’s more, it’s radioactive. Reliance upon tritium would thus pose “formidable technology and sustainability challenges,” in the words of a laboratory working on a competitive process. But we may be able to breed it: Researchers are hard at work now trying to figure out whether tritium can be coaxed out of the interaction of the neutrons produced by fusion and a lithium blanket around the reactor.

The problem with D-T is that some 80 percent of the energy in the reaction takes the form of high-energy neutrons. Unfortunately, these slowly turn the materials with which they interact radioactive, so parts of the reactor need to be replaced every few years. But the radioactivity, both from the tritium and from bombardment by high energy neutrons, is mild. The parts need only be stored a few decades, unlike the waste from fission reactors, which must be stored for centuries or millennia. It needs to be handled with care, but it’s not inherently more dangerous than the many forms of medical and chemical waste that modern societies handle safely and routinely.

D-T isn’t the only possible fuel, though other candidates seem less plausible, given the higher temperatures they require. Most private companies favor D-T, as do big government projects like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. But a few researchers are working on other ideas. So far, the most promising rival is hydrogen-boron plasma—the product of a fusion reaction involving a proton and a boron-11 nucleus, or P-B11. The goal is ignition—a reaction that produces enough power to maintain its own temperature without heat from another source. Hydrogen-boron plasma would have to be at least ten times as hot as deuterium-tritium plasma for ignition, so some laboratories are trying to induce the plasma to fuse with short bursts of energy from high-powered laser beams. This strategy has the advantage of being aneutronic, meaning it doesn’t produce neutrons as waste at all, just charged products that can be directly put to use making electricity.

There are many reactor designs, but the most tested are the tokamak (an acronym for the Russian words for toroidal magnetic confinement) and the stellarator. Both are toroid-shaped. (A donut is a toroid. So is a coffee cup. But the image you want here is your classic donut.) Both use magnets to confine and stabilize the plasma as it fuses. These days the majority of large government projects, and several private ones, are tokamaks, but stellarators are coming back in vogue.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, the world’s largest fusion project, broke ground in the south of France in 2007. Researchers at ITER, as it’s known, aim to make it a proving ground for fusion technology: They aim to produce a net energy gain of 500 thermal megawatts from a 50 megawatt input. ITER won’t actually produce electricity: It’s meant to be a precursor to an even larger tokamak, the Demonstration Power Plant, or DEMO, which would prove that nuclear fusion can indeed produce electricity—inspiring the design of more efficient and less costly power plants.

The problem with ITER is the timeline and the cost. The first plasma tests won’t start until 2025; D-T fusion won’t begin until 2035. DEMO operations won’t begin until the mid-2050s. The project has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. The original budget of US$7 billion has ballooned to US$24 billion, making it the world’s second-most expensive scientific endeavor after the International Space Station.

On their website, ITER claims they’ll produce the first fusion device to produce net energy. But they’re apt to be beaten. A number of governments have decided they can’t wait another thirty-odd years for ITER to prove itself and have begun their own programs, with accelerated timelines. Earlier this year, the US Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee and the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine each published reports calling for massive public and private investment in an American fusion power plant, with the goal of providing electricity to the grid between 2035 and 2040. A bipartisan fusion caucus in Congress formed at the same time. Meanwhile, the UK has set aside £220 million (US$311 million) for the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, or STEP. They aim to build a prototype plant that produces electricity by 2040.

Nor are Western governments the only ones on the fusion quest. China is designing the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor. The two-phase plan recalls ITER and DEMO, but their timeline is faster; they aim for completion of the first phase in the 2030s and the second in the 2040s.

Progress in the private sector has been encouraging, too. At last count, thirty companies had together raised some US$2.5 billion in investments. It’s a paltry sum compared to private investments in renewable energy, but it’s a huge increase compared to next-to-nothing, which was where we were a decade ago. In 2018, private companies formed the Fusion Industry Association to speak for the nascent industry. It has already begun to work with governments to develop appropriate industry regulations.

No clear industry leader has yet emerged, but the California-based TAE Technologies has raised the most money. They plan to start with D-T fuel, but their goal is aneutronic fusion using P-B11. Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the United States and Tokamak Energy in the UK are both working on compact spherical tokamak reactors—shaped more like a cored apple than a donut. Advances in high-temperature superconductors will help them both to build smaller, more powerful, and ultimately less expensive devices. Canada’s General Fusion is another promising start up; they’re using multiple pistons to compress a liquid metal shell; this in turn compresses plasma to fusion conditions. All of these companies believe their Kitty Hawk moment is coming in this decade; they aim to start providing electricity by 2030. It remains to be seen whether they’re right, but recent, peer-reviewed papers published in The Journal of Plasma Physics suggest the Commonwealth Fusion’s SPARC tokamak is indeed headed toward net energy.

Smaller companies are vying for a share of the pie, too. Australia’s HB11 Energy is pursuing aneutronic fusion through an innovative, laser-based method that might be far simpler and more effective than other approaches. It’s early days, but the company has raised several million dollars.

Why are we seeing this fusion renaissance? Technological advances have certainly played a role, particularly better computers with their plasma modeling power, and high-temperature superconductors that allow for stronger magnetic fields and better plasma confinement. These will ultimately lead to cheaper machines. But the biggest change has been funding. Apart from ITER, fusion research and development had been on a starvation budget for decades. Indeed, it’s remarkable that anyone made much progress at all.

Programs such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy in the United States have provided vital starter funds for research. In some cases, this led to further private investment. The program remains woefully underfunded, but fusion advocates hope the Biden Administration will increase spending in this area. If the US is serious about building their own fusion power plant, they will have to get equally serious about ramping up funding.

Let’s say we succeed in building fusion power plants. Will they be able to produce enough cheap electricity to compete with other sources? We can’t know for sure because we just haven’t got any working reactors yet. But we can be cautiously optimistic. Nicholas Hawker, the CEO of First Light Fusion, thinks that once the technology is mature, his company’s approach could deliver a levelized cost of energy as low as US$25/MWh. That would be much cheaper than nuclear energy, at about US$100/MWh. It would be half the price of onshore wind.

Even if it costs more than this, the fuel itself is essentially inexhaustible and its price insignificant. The power plants would be safe. Their impact on the environment would be minimal. They would also provide power that’s always on and reduce the need for expensive infrastructure investments such as long distance transmission lines. So fusion-generated electricity could be very competitive.

Nuclear fusion power, though, is about so much more than clean energy. With abundant fusion power we could end energy poverty once and for all, globally—and thus end poverty, period.

Nor should we keep our aspirations confined to Earth. Fusion rockets and compact power plants could allow us to expand into and past our Solar System, faster and further than otherwise possible. Soon we could be zipping from Earth to Mars, or out to the asteroid belt, in fusion-driven spaceships. The only way to travel to nearby stars within a human lifetime, probably, is on a fusion rocket. As Robert Zubrin wrote in The Case for Space,

That is a promise not to be taken lightly. It is the reason controlled fusion must be pursued despite all apparent obstacles, setbacks, and attractive alternatives. The stars are worth more than kilowatts.

There’s a lot of work to do, but fusion energy is now a question of when, not if. And the when could be here a lot faster than most people realize.

Owen Lewis (@is_fusion) is a science and space enthusiast and Christian humanist with degrees in geology and psychology. He is the Founder of Fusion is the Future.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

From Claire—If you missed it, here’s the first part of today’s Cosmopolicast: Energy Week: Beyond Thunderdome. Today we begin in medias res, so be sure to listen to them in order; otherwise, you’ll have no idea who’s who or why we’re all so agitated.

Energy Week has expanded well beyond the original plan; we’re now nearing on an Energy Month with the debate nowhere near settled, our readers hurling invective at us, and the Cosmopolitan Globalists barely on speaking terms. We’ve been calling each other Nazis on Twitter; one of us even suggested the other suffers from insecurity about his—well, frankly, never mind. Who knew? I sure didn’t when I suggested this debate. The good news is that we’ve discovered our acrimony is combustible, renewable, and more powerful than any of us imagined, so all we need to do is figure out how to harness it. Then we’ll be able safely to power the whole world, as well as Mars, well into the twenty-fourth century.

Frankly, though, we’re sick of the bickering. So until we all chill out, the Cosmopolitan Globalist will be sticking to bland, uncontroversial topics such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and whether it’s appropriate to encourage your transgender two-year-old to transition.

But before that, we’ve got to wrap things up. So today, on a hopeful note, Owen Lewis describes the promise of fusion. Tomorrow, of course, will be consecrated to Beautiful Things. On Monday, Dr. X will offer a last word about climate science, since he promised to try to answer all your questions. He won’t be able to answer every last one of them, but he has some thoughts about the best strategy, scientifically and epistemologically, for answering questions these kinds of questions.

Vivek has a terrific essay for us in the works about the economics of the energy transition, but we may wait until after the debate to publish it. There are other things happening in India right now that even more urgently require Vivek’s attention.

On Tuesday, we’ll award the Grand Prize to the best debater, and it will be very grand indeed. So hold onto your hats, because the winner will be feted in true Cosmopolitan Globalist style.

How close are we to fusion power?

by Owen Lewis

Since the first laboratory demonstration of a fusion reaction in the early 1930s, scientists have been trying to figure out how to harness the kind of energy that powers the Sun and the stars. A fusion device that produces more power than required to sustain the reaction—a result called net energy—is the holy grail. The power would be clean, reliable, and inexhaustible. It would generate significantly more power per kilogram of fuel than any other source in our grasp, including nuclear fission. What’s more, it wouldn’t emit a drop of particulate matter, carbon dioxide, or any other noxious byproduct. So far, no one has managed it. But we’re closer than you might think.

Nuclear fusion and nuclear fission are significantly different. Both processes involve atoms, and both convert mass into energy, as described in Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. But to achieve nuclear fission, you bombard a large atom, like uranium, with high-speed particles to split it into smaller atoms, unleashing an enormous amount of energy in the process. To achieve nuclear fusion, however, you go the opposite direction: It occurs when two small atoms, like hydrogen, are fused into a larger one—again releasing significant energy.

It’s not quite that simple, of course. Almost all fusion in the Sun takes place as a result of what’s known as a proton-proton chain reaction. This begins with hydrogen. Hydrogen atoms are the most abundant in the universe and the simplest: just one proton and one electron. Take away the electron, and a hydrogen atom is a naked proton. The Sun’s searing heat ionizes hydrogen into protons, then the far more immense heat and pressure at the Sun’s core fuses them into helium, the second most common atom in the universe. In the process, a small amount of the mass of the original protons, just shy of one percent, is released as energy.

It would be impractical to replicate this on the Earth. So fusion reactors here won’t begin with hydrogen, but with its isotopes. Atoms are isotopes if they have the same number of protons in their nucleus but a different number of neutrons. Hydrogen has three isotopes, protium (usually just called hydrogen), deuterium, and tritium. Many planned fusion reactors will run on deuterium-tritium fuel, because it’s comparatively easy to work with; it fuses at a mere 150 million degrees K—only ten times hotter than our Sun’s core.

Deuterium is abundant. It can be extracted from seawater. Tritium is trickier. It’s extremely rare in nature. Indeed, our current supply of tritium is an estimated twenty kilos, all artificially produced in nuclear fission reactors. What’s more, it’s radioactive. Reliance upon tritium would thus pose “formidable technology and sustainability challenges,” in the words of a laboratory working on a competitive process. But we may be able to breed it: Researchers are hard at work now trying to figure out whether tritium can be coaxed out of the interaction of the neutrons produced by fusion and a lithium blanket around the reactor.

The problem with D-T is that some 80 percent of the energy in the reaction takes the form of high-energy neutrons. Unfortunately, these slowly turn the materials with which they interact radioactive, so parts of the reactor need to be replaced every few years. But the radioactivity, both from the tritium and from bombardment by high energy neutrons, is mild. The parts need only be stored a few decades, unlike the waste from fission reactors, which must be stored for centuries or millennia. It needs to be handled with care, but it’s not inherently more dangerous than the many forms of medical and chemical waste that modern societies handle safely and routinely.

D-T isn’t the only possible fuel, though other candidates seem less plausible, given the higher temperatures they require. Most private companies favor D-T, as do big government projects like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. But a few researchers are working on other ideas. So far, the most promising rival is hydrogen-boron plasma—the product of a fusion reaction involving a proton and a boron-11 nucleus, or P-B11. The goal is ignition—a reaction that produces enough power to maintain its own temperature without heat from another source. Hydrogen-boron plasma would have to be at least ten times as hot as deuterium-tritium plasma for ignition, so some laboratories are trying to induce the plasma to fuse with short bursts of energy from high-powered laser beams. This strategy has the advantage of being aneutronic, meaning it doesn’t produce neutrons as waste at all, just charged products that can be directly put to use making electricity.

There are many reactor designs, but the most tested are the tokamak (an acronym for the Russian words for toroidal magnetic confinement) and the stellarator. Both are toroid-shaped. (A donut is a toroid. So is a coffee cup. But the image you want here is your classic donut.) Both use magnets to confine and stabilize the plasma as it fuses. These days the majority of large government projects, and several private ones, are tokamaks, but stellarators are coming back in vogue.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, the world’s largest fusion project, broke ground in the south of France in 2007. Researchers at ITER, as it’s known, aim to make it a proving ground for fusion technology: They aim to produce a net energy gain of 500 thermal megawatts from a 50 megawatt input. ITER won’t actually produce electricity: It’s meant to be a precursor to an even larger tokamak, the Demonstration Power Plant, or DEMO, which would prove that nuclear fusion can indeed produce electricity—inspiring the design of more efficient and less costly power plants.

The problem with ITER is the timeline and the cost. The first plasma tests won’t start until 2025; D-T fusion won’t begin until 2035. DEMO operations won’t begin until the mid-2050s. The project has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. The original budget of US$7 billion has ballooned to US$24 billion, making it the world’s second-most expensive scientific endeavor after the International Space Station.

On their website, ITER claims they’ll produce the first fusion device to produce net energy. But they’re apt to be beaten. A number of governments have decided they can’t wait another thirty-odd years for ITER to prove itself and have begun their own programs, with accelerated timelines. Earlier this year, the US Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee and the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine each published reports calling for massive public and private investment in an American fusion power plant, with the goal of providing electricity to the grid between 2035 and 2040. A bipartisan fusion caucus in Congress formed at the same time. Meanwhile, the UK has set aside £220 million (US$311 million) for the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, or STEP. They aim to build a prototype plant that produces electricity by 2040.

Nor are Western governments the only ones on the fusion quest. China is designing the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor. The two-phase plan recalls ITER and DEMO, but their timeline is faster; they aim for completion of the first phase in the 2030s and the second in the 2040s.

Progress in the private sector has been encouraging, too. At last count, thirty companies had together raised some US$2.5 billion in investments. It’s a paltry sum compared to private investments in renewable energy, but it’s a huge increase compared to next-to-nothing, which was where we were a decade ago. In 2018, private companies formed the Fusion Industry Association to speak for the nascent industry. It has already begun to work with governments to develop appropriate industry regulations.

No clear industry leader has yet emerged, but the California-based TAE Technologies has raised the most money. They plan to start with D-T fuel, but their goal is aneutronic fusion using P-B11. Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the United States and Tokamak Energy in the UK are both working on compact spherical tokamak reactors—shaped more like a cored apple than a donut. Advances in high-temperature superconductors will help them both to build smaller, more powerful, and ultimately less expensive devices. Canada’s General Fusion is another promising start up; they’re using multiple pistons to compress a liquid metal shell; this in turn compresses plasma to fusion conditions. All of these companies believe their Kitty Hawk moment is coming in this decade; they aim to start providing electricity by 2030. It remains to be seen whether they’re right, but recent, peer-reviewed papers published in The Journal of Plasma Physics suggest the Commonwealth Fusion’s SPARC tokamak is indeed headed toward net energy.

Smaller companies are vying for a share of the pie, too. Australia’s HB11 Energy is pursuing aneutronic fusion through an innovative, laser-based method that might be far simpler and more effective than other approaches. It’s early days, but the company has raised several million dollars.

Why are we seeing this fusion renaissance? Technological advances have certainly played a role, particularly better computers with their plasma modeling power, and high-temperature superconductors that allow for stronger magnetic fields and better plasma confinement. These will ultimately lead to cheaper machines. But the biggest change has been funding. Apart from ITER, fusion research and development had been on a starvation budget for decades. Indeed, it’s remarkable that anyone made much progress at all.

Programs such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy in the United States have provided vital starter funds for research. In some cases, this led to further private investment. The program remains woefully underfunded, but fusion advocates hope the Biden Administration will increase spending in this area. If the US is serious about building their own fusion power plant, they will have to get equally serious about ramping up funding.

Let’s say we succeed in building fusion power plants. Will they be able to produce enough cheap electricity to compete with other sources? We can’t know for sure because we just haven’t got any working reactors yet. But we can be cautiously optimistic. Nicholas Hawker, the CEO of First Light Fusion, thinks that once the technology is mature, his company’s approach could deliver a levelized cost of energy as low as US$25/MWh. That would be much cheaper than nuclear energy, at about US$100/MWh. It would be half the price of onshore wind.

Even if it costs more than this, the fuel itself is essentially inexhaustible and its price insignificant. The power plants would be safe. Their impact on the environment would be minimal. They would also provide power that’s always on and reduce the need for expensive infrastructure investments such as long distance transmission lines. So fusion-generated electricity could be very competitive.

Nuclear fusion power, though, is about so much more than clean energy. With abundant fusion power we could end energy poverty once and for all, globally—and thus end poverty, period.

Nor should we keep our aspirations confined to Earth. Fusion rockets and compact power plants could allow us to expand into and past our Solar System, faster and further than otherwise possible. Soon we could be zipping from Earth to Mars, or out to the asteroid belt, in fusion-driven spaceships. The only way to travel to nearby stars within a human lifetime, probably, is on a fusion rocket. As Robert Zubrin wrote in The Case for Space,

That is a promise not to be taken lightly. It is the reason controlled fusion must be pursued despite all apparent obstacles, setbacks, and attractive alternatives. The stars are worth more than kilowatts.

There’s a lot of work to do, but fusion energy is now a question of when, not if. And the when could be here a lot faster than most people realize.

Owen Lewis (@is_fusion) is a science and space enthusiast and Christian humanist with degrees in geology and psychology. He is the Founder of Fusion is the Future.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

From Claire—This is the first part of our Energy Week Cosmopolicast, which went on for two full hours. We’ll post the second half tomorrow. Robert Zubrin and the Lewises, père et fils, duked it out in an all-out brawl with Casey Handmer, Alexander Hurst, and Benjamin Wolf. Monique, Ron, Vivek, and I tried to keep our guests from punching below the belt. I know we always say, “This was our best Cosmopolicast yet!” but truly, this one’s a contender. If you think providing energy to the world’s 7.8 billion people must be a simple matter, listen to this one through.

Below, Robert Zubrin makes the case for nuclear and explains why he has no patience for the Greens. (To cancel your subscription, subscribe now.)

The Case for Nuclear Power

By Robert Zubrin

If you oppose carbon taxes, you will be pilloried as a climate-change denier, but if you oppose nuclear power, you will be warmly embraced by those who call themselves environmentalists. Consider this contradiction carefully. We may understand a great deal about the Green movement by studying it.

Energy is the lifeblood of civilization. Every aspect of our lives depends upon it. Energy makes modern agriculture possible; without energy, we could not dream of feeding the whole world. We need energy to transport our food, to run life-saving machines in our hospitals, to clothe ourselves and to shelter ourselves.

It is not just carbon emissions that have risen since the Industrial Revolution. Every measure of quality of life has risen, some of them exponentially. This is no coincidence. The wealthier a country is, the more energy it uses; the relationship is linear:

But more than a billion people on this planet have no electricity, and three billion more suffer from shortages. Lacking electricity is deadly and immiserating. Without reliable electricity, a society can’t escape back-breaking poverty, lower its rate of infant and maternal mortality, or raise life expectancies to the standards of the developed world. Instead, people starve or languish from malnutrition and die of wholly preventable disease.

When considering energy issues, our first concern should be the world’s most pressing moral problem: poverty. Roughly a billion of our fellow human beings live on less than a dollar day. If you have never been to a place where people are that poor—this kind of poverty does not exist in any Western country—you can only imagine it; you cannot fully grasp what it means. The existence of poverty so dire, in the modern world, is a crime. It is the world’s most serious human rights crisis.

Abundant, inexpensive energy is the remedy. When politicians speak of raising the cost of energy by, for example, levying carbon taxes, keep in mind that the people most severely penalized when the cost of energy rises are not the citizens of wealthy countries, but the poorest people in the world. If ending poverty does not weigh on your mind as a high moral priority, it is either because you don’t truly understand the suffering and indignity it represents or because you are morally insensate.

Many now demand the world cease using fossil fuels immediately. Too few seem to understand that unless they have a plan immediately to replace fossil fuels by an equally inexpensive and abundant energy source, they are calling to condemn the world’s poor to famine, squalor, misery, and death—and they are calling, too, for greatly enlarging the ranks of the desperately poor.

Many advocates of the Green movement claim that climate change is an existential threat. The standard meaning of this phrase is “a serious risk of eradicating all human life,” or even “all life on planet Earth.” Yet with all human life—even all life on Earth—allegedly at stake in reducing carbon emissions, they still militantly oppose nuclear power!

Such people, clearly, are not drawn to the Green movement because they are good at rationally assessing risk. Indeed, here is a profound and disconcerting truth about quite some number of key figures in the environmental movement: Their thinking is shot through with unreason and anti-human Malthusianism. Charitably, we may assume rank-and-file Greens do not fully understand what it would mean to deprive the poor of energy. Their embrace of policies that would in their impact be genocidal is unwitting. But original figures in the environmental movement, such as Paul Ehrlich, were indeed explicitly genocidal.

In recent years, a more rational ecomodernist movement has emerged. Some climate-crisis alarmists are willing to take their own ideas seriously and thus entertain nuclear power. This has produced a blossoming literature among a minority of environmentalists in favor of nuclear energy.

But you do not need to accept that global warming is an existential threat to agree with them. The one-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures since 1870 has scarcely affected most of the world; for Americans, it has been equivalent to moving 90 miles to the south. But rising CO2 atmospheric concentrations could indeed have a significant effect on marine life, particularly if concentrations continue to rise, and they will if the world remains dependent on fossil fuels.

What’s more, fossil fuels are enormously dangerous, quite apart from the issue of climate change. Conventional pollution from the combustion of fossil fuels causes millions of deaths every year and sickens many more; treating these illnesses costs the world billions of dollars. If human life and health matter to you, you must support greatly expanded production of energy, but such a massive expansion cannot be based on fossil fuels.

This means you must support nuclear power. It is the only proven, reliable, and scalable source of non-carbon energy on earth.

Yet for decades, environmentalists have sabotaged the nuclear industry. They have terrified the public with specious claims about the danger of nuclear power. Why?

In 1954, US Navy captain Hyman G. Rickover invented the pressurized water reactor, or PWR, as a nuclear power source for the submarine Nautilus. This design has since been the basis for the commercial nuclear industry worldwide. It is a sound engineering choice, because the PWR and related designs, such as the boiling water reactor and the pressurized heavy water reactor, use water to cool the reactor and moderate—or slow down—its neutrons, making them more effective as fission initiators. If a water-cooled and moderated reactor loses coolant, or even experiences excessive boiling, it loses moderation and thus power. It is physically impossible for a runaway chain reaction to occur with such a design.

This is why there has never once been a runaway chain reaction in any of the thousand-odd water-cooled and moderated nuclear reactors operating around the world, on land and at sea, for the past seven decades. Nor has even one person been killed by a radiological release from a PWR. This makes the PWR the safest method of producing energy ever devised.

To judge the risk of an energy system, we assess the risk per unit of energy. To do this, we divide the energy the system produces, on net, by the risk it poses to human health. For this is to be meaningful, the calculations must be based on the entire energy cycle. To weigh the risk of nuclear power against solar, for example, you can’t compare a snapshot of a fully built nuclear power plant to one of a solar farm. The assessment must include the risk of mining raw materials like uranium, for example, or the risk of using fluorine to reduce sand to silicon: Fluorine is highly corrosive; the process used to make solar panels creates massive amounts of toxic fluorine compound wastes. You must calculate the risk involved in transporting component parts, construction, manufacturing, and installation.

The claim that nuclear power is unacceptably dangerous isn’t just subtly false. It’s wildly false. The reality is exactly the contrary. Per unit of energy, there is no safer source. Nuclear power is not only safer by far than fossil fuels—even excluding the claim that fossil fuels will wipe out the human race—but safer than wind, safer than hydropower, and safer than solar. Why? Because mining and construction are unusually dangerous jobs, and lots of people fall off roofs or electrocute themselves installing solar panels.

Indeed, calculated in this fashion—and this is the only rational way to calculate it—solar power is not just more dangerous than PWR nuclear power, but more dangerous than Chernobyl. In 2005, the World Health Organization concluded that fewer than 50 deaths could be firmly attributed to that disaster, almost all among the highly exposed rescue workers. “By and large,” reported the chairman of the investigative team, “we have not found profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas, nor have we found widespread contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, within a few exceptional, restricted areas.” Assume the upper figure, 50 deaths. Nuclear power thus results in 0.0012 deaths per terawatt hour.

But no reactor in the West is as unsafe as Chernobyl. The Soviet RBMK reactor that exploded used a graphite moderator with a water coolant. It therefore had nothing like the inbuilt and ironclad safety feature of a PWR. Quite the contrary—when it lost its water coolant, its reactivity soared (because water absorbs some neutrons, but graphite does not, making graphite, by itself, a better moderator than the mixture of graphite and water). The reactor wildly overheated, setting off a steam explosion. That’s what blew the reactor apart. But even that would have had no serious consequences if the reactor had only had a containment building, as all power reactors do in every civilized country. No such system ever could have been licensed in the United States, for example.

At this point, fanatics start raving on about Three Mile Island and Fukushima. Contrary to myth, these accidents prove how safe modern nuclear plants really are. No one died at Three Mile Island. It was the only mega-catastrophe in history in which no one so much as suffered a hangnail. The whole city of Fukushima was destroyed by an earthquake and tidal wave, yet the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed, in 2015, that not one person was killed or sickened by radiation poisoning from Fukushima’s reactors. The World Health Organization projects zero increase in miscarriages, stillbirths or physical and mental disorders in babies born after the accident, not even among workers at the plant. The entire death toll was owed to the earthquake, the tsunami, and the government’s panicked decision to evacuate the elderly and vulnerable—a decision that proved far more dangerous to them than the crippled power plant.

Air pollution, by contrast, kills 4,200,000 people every year. No matter which year you choose, you will find that year in, year out, nuclear power is safer than any other source of energy. Mountains of quantitative data establish this.

What’s more, we now have evidence that when societies abandon nuclear, they shift to fossil fuels, not renewables. Japan closed its nuclear plants after Fukushima owing to public hysteria. Deadly air pollution soared. The vulnerable, as usual, were the biggest losers—people with emphysema and asthma, children, the elderly, and the infirm. Poor people cannot afford to move away from the most polluted areas of cities. Germany, too, closed its nuclear plants owing to public hysteria, initially replacing clean nuclear power with ultra-dirty lignite coal, tripling electricity costs in the process. Compare this to France, which long ago decarbonized. France pursued nuclear power long before anyone was obsessed with climate change. They did so because it’s cheap; it’s safe; and it doesn’t leave you dependent on the whims of Gulf potentates or hostage to the fate of international shipping and pipelines.

Given this, anyone who insists climate change is an existential risk, but nuclear power must be implacably opposed is not an honest environmentalist, but someone with another agenda. Exploring that agenda in depth is beyond the scope of this essay, but I have written about it, at book length, in Merchants of Despair.

This agenda is driven by a pathological ideology that I have termed antihumanism, by which lights the human race is not a miracle to be celebrated and uplifted, but a very cancer upon the earth—a horde of vermin whose unconstrained breeding endangers the so-called “natural” order, and whose ranks must therefore be culled. The chief prophets of this ideology, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich, have been enthusiastic advocates of every species of pseudoscientific batshittery, from enforced “population control” to campaigns to stop people from using pesticides or genetically improved crops to protect themselves from malaria and malnutrition. Opposition to nuclear power bubbles up from the same poisoned well. It has nothing to do with protecting the environment; to the contrary, the widespread use of nuclear power would solve many environmental problems—and it would place no constraints on economic growth. The latter part is key. Adherents of antihumanism have trouble articulating the point, but at root, this is what they find this unacceptable. They feel instinctively that human beings do not deserve to live, grow, and flourish. Do you think this an exaggeration? If so, how do you explain people who believe greenhouse gas emissions are an existential threat to humanity but reject nuclear power as “too dangerous?”

The Finnish environmentalists Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen recently laid out the case for nuclear power in an unusually competent and accessible way. In The Dark Horse: Nuclear Power and Climate Change, the authors note that civilian nuclear-power plants cannot be used to produce plutonium for bombs. Extended exposure within power reactors turns part of the plutonium 239 bred in them into plutonium 240, which can’t be used to make weapons.  

Partanen and Korhonen believe climate change is an existential threat. If you accept this premise, their conclusion in favor of nuclear power is overwhelming and irrefutable. But you do not have to accept the premise to be persuaded by their case. The one-degree-centigrade increase in global temperatures since 1870 may be inconsequential (it is the average warming experienced by an American who moves about 90 miles to the south). But CO2 atmospheric concentrations have increased 50 percent (from 280 ppm to 420 ppm), a significant change in atmospheric chemistry that will have adverse effects on marine life should the trend continue, and it will if economic development around the world remains dependent on fossil fuels. It is an uncontroversial claim that conventional pollution from fossil-fuel power plants is lethal. Climate-change arguments aside, if human life and health matter to you, you should support nuclear power.

The United States invented nuclear power, then showed how it could be used to fight poverty through our Atoms for Peace program. For a time, with bipartisan support, the United States led the world in demonstrating the way this newly understood and mastered force of nature created unlimited possibilities for the future of humanity, on Earth and in space.  

This changed in the 1970s. One of our major political parties reversed itself and declared war on nuclear power. The Carter administration aborted the United States’ plans for nuclear-fuel reprocessing and set up a regulatory obstacle course that drowned the nascent industry. Utility construction projects became a legal-intervention free-fire zone. New York governor Mario Cuomo then decided to prevent the new Shoreham plant from going online, showing that any such project might, on a governor’s whim, be turned into a complete loss.

Since then, it has been near-impossible to finance the construction of nuclear power plants. The Clinton administration canceled our breeder-reactor program. The Obama administration stopped the establishment of a waste repository in Nevada. The list goes on. When advocates insist that renewables are less expensive than nuclear and the industry more innovative, they are not accurately or honestly representing the case. Of course nuclear power will be expensive if you create regulatory obstacles like these. Any industry can be made prohibitively expensive by hostile regulation. Germany is not destroying its nuclear industry because building new solar arrays is cheaper than continuing to use already built nuclear power plants. It certainly isn’t. They are doing so because it is part of the ideological agenda of an anti-human movement that falsely advertises itself as “green.”

The fundamental premises of antihumanism are these:

* Resources are limited.

* Therefore human numbers, activities, and liberties must be severely constrained.

* Therefore someone must be empowered to do the constraining.

This thesis is a justification for tyranny and oppression, which is why intellectuals who espouse it have never lacked for sponsors. Thus these ideas return, again and again, despite refutation, over and over. In reality, the world’s resources have expanded radically as the world’s human population and human well-being have multiplied in tandem. In 1800, when Malthus wrote that production could never keep pace with population, global population was one billion and annual income equivalent to US$200 per capita. Today, the world’s 7.8 billion people earn an average US$11,000. The population increased seven times; per capita income increased fifty times; total income multiplied 350 times. Not only did production keep up with population, it multiplied as population cubed!

Malthusianism cannot survive a confrontation with the historic record. Resources have expanded faster than people have multiplied because resources are defined by technology and technology is invented by people. The more people, the more inventions. Inventions are not merely cumulative, but multiplicative. The more inventions there are, the more there is with which to invent.

The 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel developed a variant on Malthusianism often espoused by German Greens and their analogues elsewhere. Humans are part of the Earth’s “ecology” (a word Haeckel invented), and are thus supported by and limited to the “carrying capacity” of the soil. This doctrine became popular in the pre-Nazi German youth movement; it was foundational to the Nazi vision of international relations, in which nations were locked in an existential struggle for land. Its acceptance was, and must be, catastrophic. It remains fashionable among German Greens today. Yet it is completely false.

The Earth does not “carry” humanity. Human creativity carries humanity. Humans have not been dependent upon the bounty of nature since we invented agriculture in Neolithic times. We made ourselves more independent of nature by inventing techniques for exploiting fossil fuels, which otherwise do not circulate actively in the biosphere. With our invention of nuclear power, we made our independence complete. With nuclear fission, we can get as much energy out of a ton of uranium as we can from the burning of six million tons of wood. How can anyone claim to love nature when they would sooner burn down a whole forest than make use of a ton of an inorganic element for which the natural biosphere has no use whatsoever?

Down with the Sun

In 1976, the Malthusian ideologue Amory Lovins came up with the idea of the “renewable energy solution” as a justification for the war on nuclear energy. The idea that we could replace fossil fuels with solar and wind power was, and remains, nonsense. (Even Lovins implicitly recognized this fact. He called for using coal as a “bridge fuel” to the no-nuclear energy future.) To call these sources “renewables” is a misnomer; they should be called “unreliables.” Solar energy has been around since the 1950s. It remains erratic in output and weather dependent. Today it supplies 0.5 percent of humanity’s energy needs. Forcing a grid to accept unreliable power systems greatly increases costs, because they must be completely backed up by reliable power sources. These sources are a liability to a grid, not an asset.

Modern civilization was made possible by using fossil fuels, which allowed us to transcend the limits of wind, water, and biomass power. So-called renewables produce nowhere near enough energy to replace our current use, let alone the vast amount more we need to end poverty and create a bountiful human future. If they are taken offline, Europe’s nuclear power plants won’t be replaced by solar energy, but by lignite, Russian natural gas, or—if the Greens have their way—deindustrialization and poverty. The promise of Green energy is a blindfold the Malthusian firing squad has proffered to modern civilization.

Nuclear power, on the other hand, offers an energy supply millions of times greater than that of fossil fuels. Nuclear power does not leave us or anyone at the mercy of Vladimir Putin or the Saudi royal family. Our military does not need to deploy around the world to secure nuclear power’s shipping routes.

We have overwhelming evidence that nuclear power, infinite and inexhaustible, can not only power an advanced society, but do so inexpensively and safely. But dishonest demagogues, calling themselves “Friends of the Earth,” have terrified a gullible public—crippling an industry that could eradicate deadly air pollution and liberate billions of human beings around the world from poverty. This is a criminal deception.

More nuclear power plants are now closing than opening in the US, Europe, and Japan. In the US, this is because the time it takes to build a nuclear power plant has expanded from four to sixteen years because of deliberate efforts to sabotage the industry. Surveying the effects of a political wrecking operation, observers have concluded the nuclear industry is moribund. But it is not—not by a long shot. In South Korea, it still takes only four years to build a nuclear-power plant. There are now 450 nuclear-power plants in the world. China plans to build another 450 by 2050. Russia and China are seeking, aggressively, to build hundreds of nuclear plants in the developing world over the next several decades. Among countries in the free world, South Korea or India might offer them some competition. But if the leftmost part of our political spectrum has its way, America won’t be much of a player.

The Biden Administration’s infrastructure proposal includes federal subsidies and tax credits to keep American nuclear power plants in operation. But we need much more. We need a waste repository. The enemies of nuclear power oppose this because forcing manufacturers to store waste near cities allows them more plausibly make the claim that nuclear power is unsafe. We also need to prevent anti-nuclear agitators from multiplying the cost of building a nuclear power plant with regulations that have no justification in science or engineering, and through nuisance lawsuits. But even the Biden Administration’s very modest concessions to sanity have given rise to vehement opposition. Friends of the Earth has already objected, with Pavlovian predictability: “A bailout for existing reactors is wrong for the climate and wrong for consumers.”

At the beginning of the Space Age, John F. Kennedy proclaimed, “a new ocean has opened, and free men must sail it.” Nuclear power is a new ocean of energy. It will power the human future. If the United States doesn’t lead the way, someone else will. We might not like the world they build.

Robert Zubrin, @robert_zubrin an aerospace engineer, is the founder of the Mars Society and the president of Pioneer Astronautics. His latest book, The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility, was recently published by Prometheus Books.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

From Claire—This is the first part of our Energy Week Cosmopolicast, which went on for two full hours. We’ll post the second half tomorrow. Robert Zubrin and the Lewises, père et fils, duked it out in an all-out brawl with Casey Handmer, Alexander Hurst, and Benjamin Wolf. Monique, Ron, Vivek, and I tried to keep our guests from punching below the belt. I know we always say, “This was our best Cosmopolicast yet!” but truly, this one’s a contender. If you think providing energy to the world’s 7.8 billion people must be a simple matter, listen to this one through.

Below, Robert Zubrin makes the case for nuclear and explains why he has no patience for the Greens. (To cancel your subscription, subscribe now.)

The Case for Nuclear Power

By Robert Zubrin

If you oppose carbon taxes, you will be pilloried as a climate-change denier, but if you oppose nuclear power, you will be warmly embraced by those who call themselves environmentalists. Consider this contradiction carefully. We may understand a great deal about the Green movement by studying it.

Energy is the lifeblood of civilization. Every aspect of our lives depends upon it. Energy makes modern agriculture possible; without energy, we could not dream of feeding the whole world. We need energy to transport our food, to run life-saving machines in our hospitals, to clothe ourselves and to shelter ourselves.

It is not just carbon emissions that have risen since the Industrial Revolution. Every measure of quality of life has risen, some of them exponentially. This is no coincidence. The wealthier a country is, the more energy it uses; the relationship is linear:

But more than a billion people on this planet have no electricity, and three billion more suffer from shortages. Lacking electricity is deadly and immiserating. Without reliable electricity, a society can’t escape back-breaking poverty, lower its rate of infant and maternal mortality, or raise life expectancies to the standards of the developed world. Instead, people starve or languish from malnutrition and die of wholly preventable disease.

When considering energy issues, our first concern should be the world’s most pressing moral problem: poverty. Roughly a billion of our fellow human beings live on less than a dollar day. If you have never been to a place where people are that poor—this kind of poverty does not exist in any Western country—you can only imagine it; you cannot fully grasp what it means. The existence of poverty so dire, in the modern world, is a crime. It is the world’s most serious human rights crisis.

Abundant, inexpensive energy is the remedy. When politicians speak of raising the cost of energy by, for example, levying carbon taxes, keep in mind that the people most severely penalized when the cost of energy rises are not the citizens of wealthy countries, but the poorest people in the world. If ending poverty does not weigh on your mind as a high moral priority, it is either because you don’t truly understand the suffering and indignity it represents or because you are morally insensate.

Many now demand the world cease using fossil fuels immediately. Too few seem to understand that unless they have a plan immediately to replace fossil fuels by an equally inexpensive and abundant energy source, they are calling to condemn the world’s poor to famine, squalor, misery, and death—and they are calling, too, for greatly enlarging the ranks of the desperately poor.

Many advocates of the Green movement claim that climate change is an existential threat. The standard meaning of this phrase is “a serious risk of eradicating all human life,” or even “all life on planet Earth.” Yet with all human life—even all life on Earth—allegedly at stake in reducing carbon emissions, they still militantly oppose nuclear power!

Such people, clearly, are not drawn to the Green movement because they are good at rationally assessing risk. Indeed, here is a profound and disconcerting truth about quite some number of key figures in the environmental movement: Their thinking is shot through with unreason and anti-human Malthusianism. Charitably, we may assume rank-and-file Greens do not fully understand what it would mean to deprive the poor of energy. Their embrace of policies that would in their impact be genocidal is unwitting. But original figures in the environmental movement, such as Paul Ehrlich, were indeed explicitly genocidal.

In recent years, a more rational ecomodernist movement has emerged. Some climate-crisis alarmists are willing to take their own ideas seriously and thus entertain nuclear power. This has produced a blossoming literature among a minority of environmentalists in favor of nuclear energy.

But you do not need to accept that global warming is an existential threat to agree with them. The one-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures since 1870 has scarcely affected most of the world; for Americans, it has been equivalent to moving 90 miles to the south. But rising CO2 atmospheric concentrations could indeed have a significant effect on marine life, particularly if concentrations continue to rise, and they will if the world remains dependent on fossil fuels.

What’s more, fossil fuels are enormously dangerous, quite apart from the issue of climate change. Conventional pollution from the combustion of fossil fuels causes millions of deaths every year and sickens many more; treating these illnesses costs the world billions of dollars. If human life and health matter to you, you must support greatly expanded production of energy, but such a massive expansion cannot be based on fossil fuels.

This means you must support nuclear power. It is the only proven, reliable, and scalable source of non-carbon energy on earth.

Yet for decades, environmentalists have sabotaged the nuclear industry. They have terrified the public with specious claims about the danger of nuclear power. Why?

In 1954, US Navy captain Hyman G. Rickover invented the pressurized water reactor, or PWR, as a nuclear power source for the submarine Nautilus. This design has since been the basis for the commercial nuclear industry worldwide. It is a sound engineering choice, because the PWR and related designs, such as the boiling water reactor and the pressurized heavy water reactor, use water to cool the reactor and moderate—or slow down—its neutrons, making them more effective as fission initiators. If a water-cooled and moderated reactor loses coolant, or even experiences excessive boiling, it loses moderation and thus power. It is physically impossible for a runaway chain reaction to occur with such a design.

This is why there has never once been a runaway chain reaction in any of the thousand-odd water-cooled and moderated nuclear reactors operating around the world, on land and at sea, for the past seven decades. Nor has even one person been killed by a radiological release from a PWR. This makes the PWR the safest method of producing energy ever devised.

To judge the risk of an energy system, we assess the risk per unit of energy. To do this, we divide the energy the system produces, on net, by the risk it poses to human health. For this is to be meaningful, the calculations must be based on the entire energy cycle. To weigh the risk of nuclear power against solar, for example, you can’t compare a snapshot of a fully built nuclear power plant to one of a solar farm. The assessment must include the risk of mining raw materials like uranium, for example, or the risk of using fluorine to reduce sand to silicon: Fluorine is highly corrosive; the process used to make solar panels creates massive amounts of toxic fluorine compound wastes. You must calculate the risk involved in transporting component parts, construction, manufacturing, and installation.

The claim that nuclear power is unacceptably dangerous isn’t just subtly false. It’s wildly false. The reality is exactly the contrary. Per unit of energy, there is no safer source. Nuclear power is not only safer by far than fossil fuels—even excluding the claim that fossil fuels will wipe out the human race—but safer than wind, safer than hydropower, and safer than solar. Why? Because mining and construction are unusually dangerous jobs, and lots of people fall off roofs or electrocute themselves installing solar panels.

Indeed, calculated in this fashion—and this is the only rational way to calculate it—solar power is not just more dangerous than PWR nuclear power, but more dangerous than Chernobyl. In 2005, the World Health Organization concluded that fewer than 50 deaths could be firmly attributed to that disaster, almost all among the highly exposed rescue workers. “By and large,” reported the chairman of the investigative team, “we have not found profound negative health impacts to the rest of the population in surrounding areas, nor have we found widespread contamination that would continue to pose a substantial threat to human health, within a few exceptional, restricted areas.” Assume the upper figure, 50 deaths. Nuclear power thus results in 0.0012 deaths per terawatt hour.

But no reactor in the West is as unsafe as Chernobyl. The Soviet RBMK reactor that exploded used a graphite moderator with a water coolant. It therefore had nothing like the inbuilt and ironclad safety feature of a PWR. Quite the contrary—when it lost its water coolant, its reactivity soared (because water absorbs some neutrons, but graphite does not, making graphite, by itself, a better moderator than the mixture of graphite and water). The reactor wildly overheated, setting off a steam explosion. That’s what blew the reactor apart. But even that would have had no serious consequences if the reactor had only had a containment building, as all power reactors do in every civilized country. No such system ever could have been licensed in the United States, for example.

At this point, fanatics start raving on about Three Mile Island and Fukushima. Contrary to myth, these accidents prove how safe modern nuclear plants really are. No one died at Three Mile Island. It was the only mega-catastrophe in history in which no one so much as suffered a hangnail. The whole city of Fukushima was destroyed by an earthquake and tidal wave, yet the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed, in 2015, that not one person was killed or sickened by radiation poisoning from Fukushima’s reactors. The World Health Organization projects zero increase in miscarriages, stillbirths or physical and mental disorders in babies born after the accident, not even among workers at the plant. The entire death toll was owed to the earthquake, the tsunami, and the government’s panicked decision to evacuate the elderly and vulnerable—a decision that proved far more dangerous to them than the crippled power plant.

Air pollution, by contrast, kills 4,200,000 people every year. No matter which year you choose, you will find that year in, year out, nuclear power is safer than any other source of energy. Mountains of quantitative data establish this.

What’s more, we now have evidence that when societies abandon nuclear, they shift to fossil fuels, not renewables. Japan closed its nuclear plants after Fukushima owing to public hysteria. Deadly air pollution soared. The vulnerable, as usual, were the biggest losers—people with emphysema and asthma, children, the elderly, and the infirm. Poor people cannot afford to move away from the most polluted areas of cities. Germany, too, closed its nuclear plants owing to public hysteria, initially replacing clean nuclear power with ultra-dirty lignite coal, tripling electricity costs in the process. Compare this to France, which long ago decarbonized. France pursued nuclear power long before anyone was obsessed with climate change. They did so because it’s cheap; it’s safe; and it doesn’t leave you dependent on the whims of Gulf potentates or hostage to the fate of international shipping and pipelines.

Given this, anyone who insists climate change is an existential risk, but nuclear power must be implacably opposed is not an honest environmentalist, but someone with another agenda. Exploring that agenda in depth is beyond the scope of this essay, but I have written about it, at book length, in Merchants of Despair.

This agenda is driven by a pathological ideology that I have termed antihumanism, by which lights the human race is not a miracle to be celebrated and uplifted, but a very cancer upon the earth—a horde of vermin whose unconstrained breeding endangers the so-called “natural” order, and whose ranks must therefore be culled. The chief prophets of this ideology, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich, have been enthusiastic advocates of every species of pseudoscientific batshittery, from enforced “population control” to campaigns to stop people from using pesticides or genetically improved crops to protect themselves from malaria and malnutrition. Opposition to nuclear power bubbles up from the same poisoned well. It has nothing to do with protecting the environment; to the contrary, the widespread use of nuclear power would solve many environmental problems—and it would place no constraints on economic growth. The latter part is key. Adherents of antihumanism have trouble articulating the point, but at root, this is what they find this unacceptable. They feel instinctively that human beings do not deserve to live, grow, and flourish. Do you think this an exaggeration? If so, how do you explain people who believe greenhouse gas emissions are an existential threat to humanity but reject nuclear power as “too dangerous?”

The Finnish environmentalists Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen recently laid out the case for nuclear power in an unusually competent and accessible way. In The Dark Horse: Nuclear Power and Climate Change, the authors note that civilian nuclear-power plants cannot be used to produce plutonium for bombs. Extended exposure within power reactors turns part of the plutonium 239 bred in them into plutonium 240, which can’t be used to make weapons.  

Partanen and Korhonen believe climate change is an existential threat. If you accept this premise, their conclusion in favor of nuclear power is overwhelming and irrefutable. But you do not have to accept the premise to be persuaded by their case. The one-degree-centigrade increase in global temperatures since 1870 may be inconsequential (it is the average warming experienced by an American who moves about 90 miles to the south). But CO2 atmospheric concentrations have increased 50 percent (from 280 ppm to 420 ppm), a significant change in atmospheric chemistry that will have adverse effects on marine life should the trend continue, and it will if economic development around the world remains dependent on fossil fuels. It is an uncontroversial claim that conventional pollution from fossil-fuel power plants is lethal. Climate-change arguments aside, if human life and health matter to you, you should support nuclear power.

The United States invented nuclear power, then showed how it could be used to fight poverty through our Atoms for Peace program. For a time, with bipartisan support, the United States led the world in demonstrating the way this newly understood and mastered force of nature created unlimited possibilities for the future of humanity, on Earth and in space.  

This changed in the 1970s. One of our major political parties reversed itself and declared war on nuclear power. The Carter administration aborted the United States’ plans for nuclear-fuel reprocessing and set up a regulatory obstacle course that drowned the nascent industry. Utility construction projects became a legal-intervention free-fire zone. New York governor Mario Cuomo then decided to prevent the new Shoreham plant from going online, showing that any such project might, on a governor’s whim, be turned into a complete loss.

Since then, it has been near-impossible to finance the construction of nuclear power plants. The Clinton administration canceled our breeder-reactor program. The Obama administration stopped the establishment of a waste repository in Nevada. The list goes on. When advocates insist that renewables are less expensive than nuclear and the industry more innovative, they are not accurately or honestly representing the case. Of course nuclear power will be expensive if you create regulatory obstacles like these. Any industry can be made prohibitively expensive by hostile regulation. Germany is not destroying its nuclear industry because building new solar arrays is cheaper than continuing to use already built nuclear power plants. It certainly isn’t. They are doing so because it is part of the ideological agenda of an anti-human movement that falsely advertises itself as “green.”

The fundamental premises of antihumanism are these:

* Resources are limited.

* Therefore human numbers, activities, and liberties must be severely constrained.

* Therefore someone must be empowered to do the constraining.

This thesis is a justification for tyranny and oppression, which is why intellectuals who espouse it have never lacked for sponsors. Thus these ideas return, again and again, despite refutation, over and over. In reality, the world’s resources have expanded radically as the world’s human population and human well-being have multiplied in tandem. In 1800, when Malthus wrote that production could never keep pace with population, global population was one billion and annual income equivalent to US$200 per capita. Today, the world’s 7.8 billion people earn an average US$11,000. The population increased seven times; per capita income increased fifty times; total income multiplied 350 times. Not only did production keep up with population, it multiplied as population cubed!

Malthusianism cannot survive a confrontation with the historic record. Resources have expanded faster than people have multiplied because resources are defined by technology and technology is invented by people. The more people, the more inventions. Inventions are not merely cumulative, but multiplicative. The more inventions there are, the more there is with which to invent.

The 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel developed a variant on Malthusianism often espoused by German Greens and their analogues elsewhere. Humans are part of the Earth’s “ecology” (a word Haeckel invented), and are thus supported by and limited to the “carrying capacity” of the soil. This doctrine became popular in the pre-Nazi German youth movement; it was foundational to the Nazi vision of international relations, in which nations were locked in an existential struggle for land. Its acceptance was, and must be, catastrophic. It remains fashionable among German Greens today. Yet it is completely false.

The Earth does not “carry” humanity. Human creativity carries humanity. Humans have not been dependent upon the bounty of nature since we invented agriculture in Neolithic times. We made ourselves more independent of nature by inventing techniques for exploiting fossil fuels, which otherwise do not circulate actively in the biosphere. With our invention of nuclear power, we made our independence complete. With nuclear fission, we can get as much energy out of a ton of uranium as we can from the burning of six million tons of wood. How can anyone claim to love nature when they would sooner burn down a whole forest than make use of a ton of an inorganic element for which the natural biosphere has no use whatsoever?

Down with the Sun

In 1976, the Malthusian ideologue Amory Lovins came up with the idea of the “renewable energy solution” as a justification for the war on nuclear energy. The idea that we could replace fossil fuels with solar and wind power was, and remains, nonsense. (Even Lovins implicitly recognized this fact. He called for using coal as a “bridge fuel” to the no-nuclear energy future.) To call these sources “renewables” is a misnomer; they should be called “unreliables.” Solar energy has been around since the 1950s. It remains erratic in output and weather dependent. Today it supplies 0.5 percent of humanity’s energy needs. Forcing a grid to accept unreliable power systems greatly increases costs, because they must be completely backed up by reliable power sources. These sources are a liability to a grid, not an asset.

Modern civilization was made possible by using fossil fuels, which allowed us to transcend the limits of wind, water, and biomass power. So-called renewables produce nowhere near enough energy to replace our current use, let alone the vast amount more we need to end poverty and create a bountiful human future. If they are taken offline, Europe’s nuclear power plants won’t be replaced by solar energy, but by lignite, Russian natural gas, or—if the Greens have their way—deindustrialization and poverty. The promise of Green energy is a blindfold the Malthusian firing squad has proffered to modern civilization.

Nuclear power, on the other hand, offers an energy supply millions of times greater than that of fossil fuels. Nuclear power does not leave us or anyone at the mercy of Vladimir Putin or the Saudi royal family. Our military does not need to deploy around the world to secure nuclear power’s shipping routes.

We have overwhelming evidence that nuclear power, infinite and inexhaustible, can not only power an advanced society, but do so inexpensively and safely. But dishonest demagogues, calling themselves “Friends of the Earth,” have terrified a gullible public—crippling an industry that could eradicate deadly air pollution and liberate billions of human beings around the world from poverty. This is a criminal deception.

More nuclear power plants are now closing than opening in the US, Europe, and Japan. In the US, this is because the time it takes to build a nuclear power plant has expanded from four to sixteen years because of deliberate efforts to sabotage the industry. Surveying the effects of a political wrecking operation, observers have concluded the nuclear industry is moribund. But it is not—not by a long shot. In South Korea, it still takes only four years to build a nuclear-power plant. There are now 450 nuclear-power plants in the world. China plans to build another 450 by 2050. Russia and China are seeking, aggressively, to build hundreds of nuclear plants in the developing world over the next several decades. Among countries in the free world, South Korea or India might offer them some competition. But if the leftmost part of our political spectrum has its way, America won’t be much of a player.

The Biden Administration’s infrastructure proposal includes federal subsidies and tax credits to keep American nuclear power plants in operation. But we need much more. We need a waste repository. The enemies of nuclear power oppose this because forcing manufacturers to store waste near cities allows them more plausibly make the claim that nuclear power is unsafe. We also need to prevent anti-nuclear agitators from multiplying the cost of building a nuclear power plant with regulations that have no justification in science or engineering, and through nuisance lawsuits. But even the Biden Administration’s very modest concessions to sanity have given rise to vehement opposition. Friends of the Earth has already objected, with Pavlovian predictability: “A bailout for existing reactors is wrong for the climate and wrong for consumers.”

At the beginning of the Space Age, John F. Kennedy proclaimed, “a new ocean has opened, and free men must sail it.” Nuclear power is a new ocean of energy. It will power the human future. If the United States doesn’t lead the way, someone else will. We might not like the world they build.

Robert Zubrin, @robert_zubrin an aerospace engineer, is the founder of the Mars Society and the president of Pioneer Astronautics. His latest book, The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility, was recently published by Prometheus Books.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claireberlinski.substack.com/subscribe

In Part I of this essay, French foreign policy and security specialist Nicolas Tenzer begged France to weigh the implications of its alliances more carefully. Today, he explains his recommendations in detail.

We recorded this podcast last weekend. Since then, Russia has escalated its brinkmanship in and around Ukraine, and Czech authorities have expelled 18 Russian diplomats identified as operatives of the SVR and GRU. The Czech Republic holds them responsible for the 2014 blast at an ammunition depot, in the village of Vrbetice, which killed two Czech citizens. Czech police are seeking, in particular, the operatives who in 2018 tried to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the nerve agent Novichok, in Salisbury. Czech officials have asked their allies to expel Russian diplomats in solidarity. We are waiting to see if they do.

In the past week, we’ve also received reports that Navalny is near death. Yesterday, the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, wrote, “Navalny’s life is in Putin’s hands right now. If Putin allows Navalny to die in prison, no believer in human rights—no believer in right and wrong—should ever meet with Putin again. Period.”

The gravamen of Tenzer’s case lies in his response. “I fully agree with you, Mike,” he wrote. “But should world leaders have met with Putin and shaked his hand after the war crimes he committed in Syria, where he deliberately killed more civilians than ISIS?”

This podcast will be of special interest to those who wonder how French foreign policy is made and which institutions must be strengthened—or created—to put it on a more consistent footing. We meant only to record a brief introduction to this essay, but found ourselves having such an interesting conversation that we kept talking for nearly an hour.

Part I is here.

By Nicolas Tenzer

Paris

Alliances require a common narrative, and France can play a leadership role in these alliances if it is a principled power. In speeches before the UN General Assembly in September 2017 and September 2018, Emmanuel Macron invoked his support of people who are fighting for their freedom. He did so again recently, in Lithuania, supporting Belarusian demonstrators. He made the case for the universality of human rights, and took a clear stand against moral relativism and those who see these rights as a merely Western notion. These speeches lifted spirits, and particularly, the spirits of those in France who supported him because they share these values.

But Macron’s verbal blunders, and his deviations from the very principles he has articulated, have been dismaying. He condemned in no uncertain terms Assad’s crimes against humanity, but his actions against the regime in Damascus were limited. At first, he portrayed Russia as a partner in Syria, particularly in discussions of humanitarian relief, despite Russia’s war crimes and Putin’s unyielding support for Assad. His hopes for Russia’s cooperation have been, predictability, doused in cold water. He also suggested that Moscow, through the OSCE, could be a partner in resolving the crisis in Belarus, despite Moscow’s aid to the Lukashenko regime and the Kremlin’s control of Belarusian state media. Again, he was forced to abandon this unrealistic position.

Macron’s recent interview with CBS, broadcast on April 18, illustrates the predilection for equivocation that characterizes his foreign policy. It was marked by his signature phrase “en même temps,” meaning “at the same time,” which he used extensively during his 2017 presidential campaign. (France must have social solidarity and, en même temps, a free market; the state must be interventionist and, en même temps, embrace free enterprise; France must be tolerant and, en même temps, fearless in affirming its values.)

In the CBS interview, he properly called for a firm discourse toward Russia in the face of its massive deployment of troops to the Ukrainian border and within Ukraine, in the Donbass and Crimea, which has been illegally annexed since 2014. He advocated new sanctions, which is the proper stance. He even went so far as to speak of “red lines.” He did not specify these red lines, however, presumably to preserve strategic ambiguity or to avoid seeing them promptly flouted, as in Syria. En même temps, he called for discussions with Putin’s regime, even though these have never led to anything but the weakening of our position, and there is no reason to think this reality has changed.

More surprisingly, Macron accused others of naïveté about the Russian regime. He intimated that he had not been naïve, but other countries, which he did not name, had suffered from this affliction. Obviously, the term naïve might, charitably, describe such EU member states as Germany, Italy, Austria, and in particular Hungary. But most of our allies in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Nordic countries would respond that the term applies in equal measure (and with equal charity) to France. One wonders, too, whether the Kremlin, as the French president again implied, can truly contribute to the resolution of crises—from Syria to Belarus, from Ukraine to any number of African countries—when it has been the main instigator of these crises. In any event, Macron’s plan for a new “architecture of security and trust” with Russia, whatever that meant, is now dead—fortunately.

Contradicting his speeches at the UN, Macron has criticized “the fetishization of human rights.” He was slow to condemn the atrocities perpetrated by Beijing against the Uighurs, even if he did ultimately do so, and firmly. He offered only weak support to Hong Kong’s democracy activists. The asylum he offered to refugees was timid compared with Germany’s.

He spoke firmly to President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi about human rights during his January 2019 visit to Egypt. He put all his weight behind the campaign for Oleg Sentsov’s release, too. But since then, he appears to have lost ideological coherence. In December 2020, Sisi was awarded France’s highest distinction, the Grand-Croix of the Légion d’Honneur. This is a customary protocol on state visits, but human rights activists were outraged. Macron’s sincere support for the Belarusian opposition wasn’t accompanied by financial support to these figures or by support to Belarusian civil society organizations, free media, and universities. Nor did France provide asylum to Belarusian activists and students as publicly as Lithuania and Poland did.

He has at times returned to the path of moral coherency, as during his speech to the UN on September 22, 2020, but his speeches have not led to the actions one might expect. Even his rhetoric is sometimes subtly off. For example, he properly condemned Azeri aggression and Turkish support for it in Nagorno-Karabakh, but he missed the opportunity to condemn the use of prohibited weapons. France joined the rest of the world in acquiescing to Russia’s insertion of troops into both Armenia and Azerbaijan. It had no real choice: During the final months of the Trump Administration, Washington was missing in action, and without US involvement, it was impossible to prevent this outcome. But rhetoric still matters. Echoing the Minsk Group, France condemned the arrival of Syrian fighters in Nagorno-Karabakh. But these were mercenaries, properly speaking, not jihadis; by calling them “jihadis,” France mimicked the rhetoric of the Russian and Syrian regimes. This rhetoric is a major source of concern in its own right, and especially rich coming from the Kremlin, given its surpassing responsibility for the Syrian chaos.

The President’s north star in foreign policy, his most significant impulse, has been his engagement with Europe. Engaging with Europe, however, demands restoring the coherency of his impulses. He must grasp that the plight of the Belarusian people, of Russian and Chinese dissidents, of demonstrators in Hong Kong, and in Lebanon (where Macron did clearly take the side of the demonstrators against the entrenched political elites) are all aspects of the same struggle, despite the great diversity of these situations.

Some argue that no foreign policy can be entirely coherent. Tactical alliances, they hold, despite the challenge they pose to black-and-white thinking, are necessary; the demand for consistency is a straitjacket, and foreign policy requires room to maneuver. But while this pragmatic attitude has solid support in history, is it still relevant? Set aside, arguendo, economic and commercial considerations. If we can’t bring ourselves to criticize friendly countries, or ones that are in some way useful to us (the Gulf States, who are our allies against Iran, the region’s worst threat, come to mind) in the same way we do our adversaries, we give the impression of inconsistency and hypocrisy.

Why does this matter? It is indispensable now to have consistent principles, and to be seen to have them, for three reasons. First, without them, we cannot draw the public’s attention to the behavior of rogue states. The public’s support is a prerequisite to any legitimate action in the world, an imperative that increases as the legitimacy of governments declines.

Second, in Europe, law and power are intrinsically linked. We cannot move toward a more powerful Europe without justifying this development in the law.

Finally, even though these dictatorships and criminal regimes compete with one another, they form a grouping of historically and territorially revisionist powers, a revisionist Internationale. Indeed, their revisionism is an instrument of war—hybrid war, in the term of art—against those who stand against them seeking freedom. We see it at work from Syria to Belarus, from Venezuela to Myanmar. Those seeking freedom compose another international grouping; we may call them an Internationale of liberty.

In the face of these major international threats, the French president must raise the public’s awareness. These debates cannot remain on the margins of politics. It is a welcome sign that elected officials are growingly engaged with significant international issues, from Belarus to Chinese internment camps to the defense of Hong Kong’s special status to human rights violations in Iran. This attention is all the more essential because states hostile to freedom are waging war against democratic norms on our own soil; they shape public opinion by supporting movements that create disorder, stir up trouble, and promote the most extreme parties.

Rediscovering the Reality Principle

Crisis has prompted the French president to rediscover the Reality Principle, as he himself recognized when he spoke of “the tragedy of history.” Contrary to the idealistic notion that the threat of authoritarian regimes may be made to disappear, either by negotiation or through economic development (development has become a fetish, too, one often contradicted by the evidence), realism consists in recognizing the severity of threats and giving oneself ample means to fight them. For French policy, this means changing the software in four key respects.

First, in the conduct of diplomacy, we must grasp that the regime is always more important than the state, and its actions now more important than ancient history. If a head of state seeks to grasp reality, he or she must first understand the dynamics and the specific ideology of regimes—a point we have understood since Aron. Russia does not exist, in the abstract, on the international scene, without Putin’s regime. Nor does China exist without the regime of Xi Jinping, nor Turkey without Erdoğan’s regime. Invoking the great figures of Russian literature or music, the thousand-year-old civilization of China, or the splendors of Isfahan is of little use when dealing with the dangers posed today by Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. It serves merely to reproduce the rhetoric of these regimes.

If a regime’s actions are hostile, we must strengthen the forces opposed to it, particularly the political opposition. We must do so not merely because our principles demand it, but because it is in our interest to do so. We must, especially, do much more to assist the political groups, NGOs, and media who are fighting for freedom. This may include supporting countries, recognized or unrecognized, and particularly Taiwan, which deserves much more of our solidarity because, for now, it is the only democratic China. In today’s international landscape, politics must take precedence over geographic and historical considerations. We cannot accept the old notion of great power politics, wherein the most powerful nations are worth more than the “small nations” Milan Kundera described. In the same spirit, we must support Kyiv, attacked by Moscow; and Taipei, threatened by Beijing, without the rhetorical deflection to “both sides” typical of our diplomatic language. Here, as elsewhere, Europe must not seek a so-called balance.

Second, we must beware the trap of believing that our adversaries are as rational as we are. We tend to equate rationality with interests. But interests are not merely material, economic, or linked to a certain geopolitical disposition. They include values—another point Aron emphasized half a century ago. Our values include peace, law, justice, freedom, and democracy. Some regimes share none of these values; they exploit multilateral organizations and wage propaganda wars—if not outright wars—within democracies so better to besmirch these values and render them obsolete.

Our hierarchy of interests is not theirs; striving to hold discussions with them based on our shared sense of rationality is not only senseless, but diplomatically futile. We must grasp how they perceive their interests accurately if we wish our inducements and our sanctions to work.

The illusion of stability

Third, we must be vigilant against the temptation to focus on so-called stability and prioritize what has been termed an “eradicationist” policy. Short-term stability can endanger longer-term stability, especially when it leads us to support dictatorships that are doomed eventually to collapse under the weight of popular pressure. The pursuit of stability above all tends to establish a peace that enshrines domination and subjugation, or freezes a conflict in place. It is thus neither truly peaceful nor stable. For very different reasons, it would not be stabilizing to reach an agreement on the Donbass that rewards Russian aggression, nor one that acquiesces to Assad’s seizure of Idlib, nor one that accedes to the the domination of Libya by Haftar’s forces. Ending a conflict is not a goal in and of itself.

In all these cases, a peace of this kind would legitimize the victory of a large, hostile state. This would be to the detriment, in Ukraine’s case, of a smaller country struggling for freedom and integrity. It would be to the detriment, in Syria, of international criminal law, for it would make it even more difficult to bring Assad, who has committed crimes against humanity, to trial. It would be to the detriment, in Libya and Syria alike, of real security in the longer term.

Essential though the fight against all forms of terrorism may be, an eradicationist policy cannot replace foreign policy or the reform of existing governments. Assad’s objective alliance with terrorist movements has been demonstrated; his utter destruction of Syria is a godsend for the terrorist groups of tomorrow; beyond that, the limits of eradicationist policy in Algeria, in the Tunisia of Ben Ali, and today, in Sisi’s Egypt, are clear. If we adopt the discourse of the dictators of these countries, in whose lights the choice is between tyranny and Islamist terrorism, and who have translated this discourse into the repression, above all, of democratic movements, we will have lost everything—our principles and our security alike. In the Sahel, and particularly in Mali, an eradicationist policy is a tool exploited by ineffective incumbent governments to stay in power. It doesn’t necessarily improve our long-term security, nor our understanding of the local landscape.

The fourth rule concerns the destiny of Europe. In the past, we failed to think of Europe as a power; we saw it, according to a rather French doctrine, as a balance of power. Now that the desire to endow Europe with the attributes of a power has become widespread, some continue to seek a balance of power—an antique notion whose relevance to the contemporary world remains to be demonstrated. Proponents of this idea believe Europe should not only ensure a balance of power between the United States and China, but act as a mediator in any conflict between the largest powers, be they in Europe itself, or the Middle East, or even in Asia. Sometimes, this geography-enchanted vision—which is strategically incoherent under current conditions—places Russia in Europe. It’s a vision in which the European Union practices a kind of subtle equidistance so better to ease conflicts and contribute to a more stable international order. Somehow, according to this vision, the EU should practice a mix of commitment and neutrality. But any Europe that means to be a power in its own right must respect two principles that contradict this idea of a balance of power.

Defining its own path

The first principle is respect for alliances, both within Europe and outside of it. Solidarity always trumps neutrality.

The second takes the form of an affirmation: Europe does not need to define itself “in relation to” anyone, and it doesn’t need an internal balance of power. It defines itself in relation to its principles and it acts accordingly. In particular, Europe does not have to define itself in relation to the United States. It need not seek distance from the United States on principle. It should seek convergence with Washington when it is in line with Europe’s security interests, especially in the face of the systemic dangers posed by Moscow and Beijing today. It should express difference only if it genuinely disagrees.

It is critical that France retain the ability to define its own path without compromising its principles, and it is in this context that we should assess Emmanuel Macron’s call for European strategic autonomy. He may envision this as a hedge against the risk of the withdrawal of the United States. In the best-case scenario, he may envision it as a path to strengthen the Atlantic Alliance.

Had Trump been re-elected, and had he demonstrated, as expected, increased subservience toward Putin—up to and including withdrawing the United States from NATO—Europe would have had to transform the alliance into a European organization. It is very far from being one. With Biden’s election, we must gratefully consider the Atlantic Alliance our only true bulwark against threats and strengthen it. It will be a long time before Europe is able to offer security guarantees as powerful as Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. France must invest more thought, and also determination, to mitigate the risk of the “brain death” of the Alliance.

If European strategic autonomy emerges, it may involve something beyond NATO, which remains a purely defensive alliance. The value of strategic autonomy could be imagined, for example, by recalling our situation in 2013, when Barack Obama refused to enforce his red lines in Syria following the chemical attacks on Ghouta. Had Europe some form of strategic autonomy, it could have intervened alone. This counterfactual serves to illustrate the positive potential of the term. But for its defense, Europe will continue to rely on NATO, whatever its future form.

Here we return to the question of timescales. We must have a long-term vision for strengthening, one way or another, our ability to defend ourselves. Structures are less important in this than capacity, and rhetoric less important than resolve. We can imagine a future in which Europe is reconciled with a more democratic Russia; indeed, this is devoutly to be hoped. But this prospect, by definition uncertain and even chimerical, must not distract us from the immediate tasks before us, nor from scenarios that are alas more likely and their implications for our defense. Still less should such pleasant chimeras lead us to join the rhetorical chorus of our adversaries and weaken our alliances.  

Nicolas Tenzer is a senior French civil servant and the founding president of the Paris-based independent think tank, Centre d’étude et de réflexion pour l’Action politique (Center for Study and Research for Political Decision). An expert and author on foreign policy and security, he has written three official reports for the French government. He is a guest professor at Sciences-Po Paris.

This essay is based upon a French original published in The Conversation.

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