The fusion future that may never arrive

With the supposed need for vast new electricity generation to fuel the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, AI companies are pushing nuclear power as one solution to provide that power for the many data centers they plan to build. (Count me skeptical of the boom and therefore of the need for vast new electricity generation capacity. See here, here, here, here and here.) AI boosters usually talk about expanding existing nuclear power technologies, that is, fission reactors that run on uranium and (more dangerously) on plutonium.

But it is well to keep in mind that there are two kinds of nuclear power: fission and fusion. For now, there are no commercial fusion reactors since with current technology it takes far more than the equivalent of a kilowatt of energy to produce a kilowatt of electricity. This is because it takes a lot of energy just to get a fusion reaction going. The current state of affairs in fusion reminds me of the old joke about the manufacturer who admits he loses a nickel on every sale, but claims he makes it up in volume.

Fortunately, fusion researchers are smarter than this and await the day when fusion technology can produce more energy than it consumes. That waiting has spawned another well-worn joke about the coming of clean, limitless fusion energy, namely, that it's only 25 years away and always will be. (Whether fusion energy will be clean, that is, non-radioactive, is debatable.)

Informers: The new drive to get Americans to spy on one another

It should come as no surprise that governments throughout history have enlisted their citizens to spy on one another. Some publicly stated reasons have included stopping subversives from overthrowing the government, catching foreign spies and agents, and stopping terrorist attacks.

For at least the fourth time in a little over a century, the U.S. government is publicly trying to enlist its citizens into a vast network of spies who will report behavior the current administration doesn't like. For the record the previous three times were:

1. The first Red Scare between 1917 and 1920 which rounded up thousands of supposed sympathizers of the Russian Revolution and imprisoned them, proving that such activities do not depend on which party is in charge of the federal government since, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was president at the time.


2. The second Red Scare, often called the McCarthy Era, in the late 1940s and early 1950s after U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy who publicly accused many prominent actors and writers, government employees and others of being communists disloyal to the United States and asking them to name others who were communists. McCarthy was famous for having "lists" of communists in various government departments and areas of public life.


3. Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, a proposal by the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s to enlist U.S. workers such as cable installers, home repair technicians, and U.S. Postal Service carriers to report suspicious activities in and around the homes of private citizens.

Now we have the fourth effort. The current U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, has provided a brief outline of what the Trump administration says it is doing to implement the president's National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7. The supposed targets of the effort are "Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups." (Antifa is short for anti-fascist.)*

Some key metals are byproducts of mining other metals; that's a problem

When we hear the word "byproduct," it often designates something unwanted or even negative coming out of a decision or process that provides some product or outcome we do want. In the world of mining, however, byproducts are often valuable minerals produced in the course of extracting other desired minerals from their ores.

For example, zinc mines often also produce profitable quantities of lead and silver. And, it can be the other way round; gold, silver and copper mines can sometimes also contain profitable quantities of zinc. I mention zinc, in particular, because zinc mines are one source for gallium, a metal that is important for advanced semiconductors. Gallium is also used in aerospace, optical devices and medical devices. Needless to say it is in high demand and is important for military applications.

Another source of gallium is aluminum ore, usually bauxite, and it's the biggest source. What you will not find on planet earth are any gallium mines because geologic processes in the Earth simply do not allow gallium to concentrate in a manner that would create a profitable ore body. So, it turns out that no matter how high the price of gallium goes—and the price is up by almost a factor of five since 2016—its supply depends almost exclusively on the rate of extraction of aluminum and zinc ores (and not all such ore bodies have concentrations of gallium that are worth extracting).