CO2 emissions are rising. The Glasgow climate summit failed. Three billion people get less than a tenth of the electricity a U.S. citizen uses. Ecologists want to electrify cars and trucks. Electricity demand will surely double, and countries around the world plan to meet that need with fission: The United Arab Emirates just built four new fission power plants, China will build nearly one a month, and the UK’s Johnson and France’s Macron want many more.
Energy drives productivity. Its rising costs divert more economic effort to extracting and delivering it, and less to sustaining civilization’s lifestyles. Our world's energy supply crisis is as important as global warming.
In this class, we’ll explore topics and questions about energy, including how nuclear fission might effectively reduce global warming while helping energy-poor nations reach prosperity. Presentation topics, with Q&A breaks, will include humanity’s insatiable energy appetite; intermittency of wind and solar sources; strategic trade in energy fuels and materials; mass-producing fission power plants; radiation fear; transportation and synfuels; industry and buildings.
There will be some required readings.