Nuclear Power and the Road to Fusion

I think nuclear power is one of the most promising energy resources available to us, and I find the renewed interest in it encouraging.

Not simply because of what nuclear power can do for us today, but because of what it might eventually become.

There is a tendency to look at a technology as it exists today and assume that this is more or less what it will always look like. Nuclear power plants are enormous, complicated, and expensive, so we tend to imagine that nuclear power will always require enormous, complicated, and expensive facilities.

But that isn't generally how technology develops.

Consider the transistor.

The first practical transistors were relatively large, individually manufactured devices. Today we manufacture microscopic transistors by the billions on a single chip. That didn't happen simply because someone invented the transistor and then waited seventy years. It happened because transistors were useful.

So we used them.

Because we used them, companies invested in them. Engineers improved them. Manufacturing techniques improved. New materials were developed. Costs came down. Reliability went up. Smaller and more efficient transistors made new products possible, and those new products created still more demand for better transistors.

Obviously, a nuclear reactor is not a transistor. I'm not suggesting that nuclear reactors will follow Moore's Law until we have one sitting next to the lawn mower in the backyard.

The point is what happens when we actually use a technology.

If we continue building and operating nuclear power plants, we need nuclear engineers. We need physicists and materials scientists. We need companies capable of manufacturing specialized components. We need universities teaching nuclear science and engineering. We need research into reactor design, materials, radiation resistance, heat transfer, power conversion, and dozens of other related technologies.

And, perhaps most importantly, we have a reason to spend money on all of those things.

If, instead, we decide that nuclear power is something from which we should retreat, that entire technological infrastructure begins to diminish. Fewer reactors mean less demand for nuclear engineers, fewer companies investing in nuclear technology, less manufacturing experience, less research, and eventually less political justification for spending large amounts of money advancing nuclear science.

That brings us to fusion.

Fission does not somehow become fusion. They are fundamentally different nuclear processes, and practical fusion presents an entirely different collection of scientific and engineering problems.

But I think it would be a mistake to believe that our willingness to pursue one has nothing to do with our willingness to pursue the other.

A society actively using nuclear energy, educating nuclear engineers, developing advanced materials, building reactors, maintaining a nuclear manufacturing industry, and investing in nuclear research is much more likely to have both the resources and the political willingness to pursue fusion seriously.

And once practical fusion is achieved, that shouldn't be regarded as the end of the story.

It will be the beginning.

The first commercially practical fusion reactor will almost certainly not represent the ultimate form of fusion power any more than the first transistor represented the ultimate form of electronics.

Once engineers have something that works, they start asking different questions.

Can we make it cheaper?

Can we make it more reliable?

Can we make it more efficient?

Can we make it easier to manufacture?

And, inevitably, can we make it smaller?

Fusion has an extraordinary amount of potential energy available from a relatively small quantity of fuel. The problem isn't finding enough energy in the nuclear reaction. The problem is all of the machinery currently required to create, contain, sustain, and extract useful power from that reaction.

Those are extraordinarily difficult problems.

But they are problems we can work on.

I don't expect anyone to install a fusion reactor in the basement anytime soon. I don't expect a neighborhood fusion reactor to appear next to the community swimming pool in twenty years.

But what about fifty years?

A hundred?

Could advances in superconductors, materials science, plasma control, power conversion, manufacturing, and reactor design eventually produce fusion systems vastly smaller than the experimental machines we build today?

Could we someday reach the point where a fusion power source capable of supplying an entire neighborhood is contained in something approaching the size of a backyard shed?

I don't know.

Perhaps there are physical or economic limitations that will make that impractical. Perhaps fusion will always make more sense as a large, centralized source of power.

But we will never discover what the mature form of a technology looks like if we abandon the technology before it has a chance to mature.

That is why I think continued development of fission power is important even if fusion ultimately becomes the nuclear energy source we really want.

Fission gives us useful energy today. More importantly for the future, it keeps nuclear science alive as an active technology rather than merely an academic subject. It maintains the engineers, researchers, manufacturers, infrastructure, investment, and public familiarity from which the next generation of nuclear technology can grow.

If we want to know what nuclear power might look like fifty or a hundred years from now, the best way to find out isn't to stop building it.

It's to use it.

Flock Cameras: When Observation Becomes Surveillance

 Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems—commonly known by the popular brand name "Flock cameras"—are often presented as little more than high-tech security cameras. That description, however, leaves out the feature that has many Americans concerned.

Think of an ALPR camera as a security camera with a memory. Rather than simply recording video, it identifies every passing vehicle and records information such as the license plate, date, time, location, make, model, color, and often distinguishing characteristics like bumper stickers, roof racks, aftermarket accessories, or visible damage. That information is then stored in a searchable database.

Supporters argue that these systems help solve crimes by giving investigators another tool to locate stolen vehicles or identify suspects. There is no question that ALPR systems have legitimate law enforcement applications.

The constitutional concern is not about targeted investigations. It is about the routine collection and long-term storage of information on millions of innocent Americans who are suspected of no crime.

Imagine that every time you drove down a road, someone wrote down your license plate, described your vehicle, recorded where you were and when you passed, and kept those notes for months or even years. Most people would recognize that as surveillance. ALPR systems simply automate that process on a massive scale.

Some argue that because license plates are visible in public, there is no expectation of privacy. I believe that misses the larger issue. There is a significant difference between a police officer observing a vehicle on a public street at a single moment in time and the government maintaining a permanent database capable of reconstructing a person's movements over weeks, months, or years.

Where you travel can reveal a surprising amount about your life. It may disclose where you worship, which doctors you visit, whether you sought legal counsel, attended a political rally, visited family, or participated in a support group. None of those activities are criminal, yet all become part of a searchable historical record when mass surveillance systems are allowed to operate without meaningful limits.

The Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect citizens from unreasonable government intrusion. Whether ALPR databases ultimately violate that protection is a question courts continue to examine. But I believe the principle is clear: government should not be compiling detailed travel histories of innocent citizens without judicial oversight.

Technology has made mass surveillance easier than ever before. That convenience should not become an excuse to weaken the constitutional safeguards that have protected individual liberty for more than two centuries.

Crime fighting is an important responsibility of government. So is protecting the constitutional rights of the people. We should be able to do both without sacrificing one for the other.