Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. – Valery Legaso, Chernobyl

Foresight Friday Following trends that are shaping potential futures

Good day,,

Happy St. Patricks Day to you this Friday morning. While according to my 23andMe profile, I do not explicitly have Irish DNA, I do enjoy the American traditions associated with the holiday.   St. Patrick was British-born and kidnapped and enslaved by the Irish at 16, He later escaped, but returned to Ireland and was credited with bringing Christianity to its people. According to legend, Saint Patrick used the three-leaved shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to Irish pagans. ??   Later today, Amanda and I will celebrate with friends, some corned beef and cabbage, and mostly with Guinness and oysters. Irish tradition? Nope. Rather, the tradition of David Ogilvy and his creative 1950s ad campaign, “The Guinness Guide to Oysters,” featuring nine varieties of oysters.

Nuclear energy and harm reduction

I've long supported nuclear energy as part of our long-term solution to civilization's energy needs. Last week, Georgia Power's Vogtle nuclear reactor Unit 3 started a nuclear reaction inside the reactor. It will be fully operational by June and is the first new nuclear reactor in nearly seven years.   A recent episode of Freakonomics explores the potential of robustly including nuclear in our energy portfolio by positioning the discussion – like the opioid epidemic – around harm reduction. Similar to providing safe environments to drug users in an effort to reduce deaths from overdose as an entry point to combating addiction, could nuclear give us a strong push towards clean energy?

Chernobyl and the Russian war on Ukraine

Following the rabbit hole presented by the Freakonomics episode led me to the Chernobyl mini-series on HBO, which dramatizes the story of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.   The dramatization does a good job of getting the facts about the cause and ramifications of the accident correct while also creating a sound narrative from a less-than-transparent Soviet public record. The above quote by the character Valery Legaso is fictional but the person portrayed was very real and took his own life, exactly two years after the accident. Former president Mikhail Gorbachev stated years later that the Chernobyl explosion "was perhaps the main cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse five years later."   The biggest takeaway I took from digging into the history of Chernobyl, however, was not surrounding any perceived fears of Nuclear power plants. Instead, it illustrated to me how potentially long and grueling the current war on Ukraine would have to become before Russia might back down from Putin's efforts to recapture former Soviet lands.

Tradition and national identity are important considerations when evaluating potential futures. St. Patrick's Day today is a secular celebration of Irish culture that welcomes people of any culture to celebrate.   Nuclear energy in the United States also has tradition. The Navy has logged nearly 6,000 reactor years of accident-free operations and traveled over 130 million miles on nuclear energy, with thousands of people living aboard. With barely 8% of our energy currently coming from nuclear, there is a clear case for increasing this.   I believe we can do this and I believe that America is uniquely situated to learn from its Navy and build out a safe and decentralized nuclear energy system that augments our other green options.

Gratefully,   Vinny Tafuro   Visionary. Economist. Hacker. "I see distant horizons clearly and work meticulously towards them." Institute for Economic Evolution, Founder 813.240.0739

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