"Power To Cheap To Meter:" A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, August 1955

 

The now-closed Dounreay fast breeder reactor in Caithness, Scotland

I had to watch one of those "You should totally buy AI because it can actually do stuff" ads to get to this clip. 

Anyway, the experience of postblogging technology is always weird because it's the most direct and easiest way to encounter that classic historian's disconnect between the popular history that solidifies around an event, and the actual events. Guys! There was no Sputnik surprise! Everyone  knew that the Americans and Soviets were going to launch satellites during the (eighteen month) International Geophysical Year and that the Soviets were talking about an earlier launch date than the Americans. I don't think I've come close to unpacking why it was said to be a surprise, but we've got two years to go on that one. 

 "Power too cheap to meter" is a quote from Lewis Strauss, speaking in 1954 to the National Association of Science Writers. Strauss has not been well treated by history, and I am not here to be contrarian, but he went on to offer water as an example of something that progress had made "too cheap to meter," and from that perspective it's at least a plausible bit of prediction. Had he chosen to talk about about long-distance telephony, he would come across a regular prophet! For that matter, he turns out to have been a lot more wrong about predicting extended lifespans. Unmetered power turns out to be further away than ever, but at least there's a road to this outcome. The Wiki goes on to explain that the "statement was contentious from the start . . ." pointing out that, even in 1954, the AEC was not boundlessly optimistic about the future costs of nuclear power, and that one researcher found "dozens of statements" to that effect. Strauss' son seems to have hijacked the conversation by proposing that Strauss was talking about fusion power, something that we've seen as problematic at the Geneva Atomics for Peace conference, where Strauss comes out with a more typical blunder, trying to keep American fusion research secret for no particular reason. But, of course, "power to cheap to meter" comes out of Geneva very directly in a way that has nothing to do with either conventional atomic power or fusion: Breeder reactors. 

By JWB at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.,
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The idea here is pretty simple. Nuclear reactors work because when a neutron hits a uranium atom, the uranium atom splits, producing more than one neutron. Some of the neutrons escape, but pile enough of a uranium isotope with a high proclivity to split together with regular uranium within a reflective shell, and the uranium "burns," producing thermal energy that can be captured for power generation. Make the shell out of heavy elements that are transmuted into fissionable atoms when they capture escaping neutrons, and you have a power generating fuel mass that produces --"breeds"-- more fuel as a byproduct. The diagram above gets a bit more into the details of the specific transuranic elements to which the fissionable atoms belong. As this only works if neutrons are used so efficiently that more fuel is produced than burned, only reactors designed for "high neutron economy" can work as breeder reactors. Things get a bit more complicated at this point --we have to talk about neutron capture cross-sections, but the big news at Geneva was the British announcement that their first fast breeder reactor produced two units of power for every unit of power consumed. 

The Wikipedia article on the DIDO family of high neutron
flux reactors only has one illustration, of the Australian fcility.
Here it is!
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Later interviews with the pioneers of atomic power in Britain emphasize research into fast breeder reactors. Commercial atomic power was the long term future, and a domestic British atomic power generation industry would presumably be hostage to world uranium prices. Breeder reactors would largely free Britain from the costs of importing uranium. Whatever you think of the viability of atomic power, it is hard to fault the reasoning. The more practical engineers within the AEAA were skeptical (to say the least) of fast breeders, but that just makes prototyping and fundamental research more important! The weird thing is that the conversation then jumps right to the Dounreay experimental FBR, and skips right over the ZEPHYR "zero energy" Fast Breeder that ran at Harwell from 1954 to 1958. (An output of a few watts is listed here, justifying the claims made at Geneva.) The other Harwell reactor, DIDO, was presented at Geneva as intended to test the corrosive effects of neutron radiation. DIDO is more exciting than ZEPHYR in that it seems like the British are in a better position to export atomic power equipment because they are actually doing this research, or, at least, releasing it. ("No information has been provided" about the intended neutron activation research at the American CLEMENTINE test reactor, operational from 1951, says Wikipedia blandly. Strauss being Strauss, or did the design not work out?) 

So what's the fuss about here, exactly? Well, the fundamental claim made about ZEPHYR is that it proves the possibility of an atomic reactor that might well run its entire productive life on its first load of fuel, and provide enough power, based on estimated quantities of uranium ore in the world, for whole geological epochs. Now that's "power too cheap to meter!" 

Or they could just run on thorium, which is more abundant and cheaper than uranium. And, oh, hey, look at this lead headline in Business for 29 August: "Why Buy Uranium Stocks Now?" Fast breeders, fusion, even thorium: They all imply that the uranium prospecting boom in the American West is a high tech investment bubble. Which is true, because there's a lot more uranium ore out there. 

The picture above, which seems to be from the University of Utah archives, is of Charles A. Steen's hilltop mansion in Moab, Utah, a regional centre out in the south Utah desert that briefly held 26 uranium millionaires in 1956. Steen might have been the most successful of them, or just has the best curated memorial presence on the Internet. He's also pretty typical of the breed in that he built an ostentatious (by the subdued standards of the mid-Fifties) mansion in Moab, threw his money around on impractical investments, suffered a plausibly-disabling brain injury, ran for office in 1959 as a Republican, and died in the obligatory poverty that doesn't seem to have been that impoverished given that his sons are burnishing his memory on the Internet, and not rummaging through the recycling bins in suburban Salt Lake City. The salient point is that, as of August of 1955, serious investors like Floyd Odlum, Anaconda, Kerr-McGee, and the Santa Fe have thrown in on uranium mining. This isn't just for sunstruck eccentrics looking for a lost Spanish uranium mine any more. 

While there's nothing excessively implausible about the story of a uranium or even atomic power investment boom as of the summer of 1955, with seventy years of hindsight it looks like a familiar story. Exactly how often have tech bubbles threatened the stability of the U.S. financial sector over the years? Can they be linked to recessions, or just sad stories like the Steen family? The 1958 "second Eisenhower recession" has plenty of parents, and might simply demonstrate the way that credit tightening tends to overshoot the mark, perhaps deliberately. But then maybe tech booms are endogenous to the credit tightening/loosening rhythm with which modern economies are stuck; or, even, specifically of the congenitally under-regulated American case.

Oh, and as a side note, wouldn't atomic power too cheap to meter be a nice thing to have around about now?