From fire to fusion: the story of a species
The renowned historical author Richard Rhodes has written what aspires to be an authoritative history of human energy generation, spanning wood-gathering and whaling, coal and petroleum, sun and wind, water and nuclear power. An erudite storyteller with a knack for enlivening historical personalities, contexts and technical operations, Rhodes charts a four-part investigation into how energy sources have been directed toward creating heat, light and propulsion. Consistent themes rise to the surface amid the 20 chapters—including the importance of infrastructure in seemingly every form of energy production and the challenge of the intermittency problem across a range of energy platforms.
Overall, Energy succeeds as a descriptive tome that lays out numerous historical, biographical and mechanical intricacies of energy innovation in England and the United States and thusdeepens readers’ understanding of forces that have shaped the modern world. It is, however, less successful as a prescriptive guidebook that draws on those lessons learned to intimate possible courses of action for how to grapple with “the great challenge of the twenty-first century,” namely, “limiting global warming while simultaneously providing energy for a world population not only increasing in number but also advancing from subsistence to prosperity.” (The ecologist Vaclav Smil’s renowned books on energy production and Paul Hawken’s Drawdown project are better suited to that task.)
To be fair, Rhodes offers this book primarily as a history of energy and not as a practical sourcebook or guide for the future. Even so, he recognizes that “today’s challenges are the legacies of historic transitions” and describes his intention “to enliven the debate and clarify choices” by filling in “the rich human history behind today’s energy challenges.” Rhodes’s preferred historical approach is biographical-evocative, offering detailed archival resources and micro-histories of individual human beings behind technological innovation. To humanize the history of energy innovation is an intriguing task, one that extends far beyond the oft-invoked James Watt. Rhodes introduced me to many figures of whom I was previously unaware, and I was drawn to the artful ways he integrates these mechanical innovators with contemporaneous developments in science (like chemistry and geology) as well as the rise to prominence of august scientific guilds like the Royal Academy. He is also expert at drawing illustrative turns of phrase. Particularly fascinating were the chapter on whaling, the descriptions of steam engine development, the history of kerosene markets and his analyses of nuclear activism.
The great challenge of the 21st century will be “limiting global warming while simultaneously providing energy for a world population not only increasing in number but also advancing from subsistence to prosperity.”
It is, of course, entirely true that the landscape of energy sources and uses would be radically different today were it not for the lives of these white men of science and technology who struggled and prospered in England and the United States. Yet I was also left with a distinct sense that Energy fails sufficiently to account for the massive influence of structures of political and economic domination that have undergirded the possibility of energy extraction, promulgation and development. While Energy does on several occasions note that Europeans' acquisitions of land inhabited by indigenous peoples were conducted under unfair terms, he also at times seems to imply that the interior of North America was functionally uninhabited: As canals and railroads “penetrated the American wilderness and fostered its settlement,” he writes, “these new people and places needed lighting.” More attention needs to be paid to the self-justifying expansionist social and economic philosophy that characterized the notion of Manifest Destiny.
Indeed, a human history of energy must include more than the individual or biographical. It should also include analyses of political, legal and economic structures that have undergirded certain trajectories of energy development. Much more attention needs to be paid specifically to capitalism, colonialism and resource expropriation, as well as to the vast world beyond England and the United States. Useful companion volumes that shed greater light on such aspects of history are Fossil Capital, by Andreas Malm, and The Great Derangement, by Amitav Ghosh (both published in 2016).
What of so-called renewables? Compared with the attention given to other sources of energy, the history and current status of solar and wind is paltry (see Drawdown, by Paul Hawken, for an antidote). Rhodes treats water—especially hydropower—in somewhat greater detail, but the characterization of hydropower as renewable or “clean” is suspect here and elsewhere. Large dams carry massive consequences for population displacement, ecological niche destruction and climate change, and have long-term implications for the renewability of groundwater sources.
Nuclear power is one place where Energy really shines—no accident, given that Rhodes has written several books on the development of atomic technologies and related topics. In fact, by the end of the book, I fervently wished that Rhodes had been willing to give more prominence to his convictions from the opening pages of the book, because Energy does have a prescriptive (if buried) thesis: Nuclear power is one part of a solution to global warming.
To those who would find nuclear energy threatening, Rhodes analyzes the history of antinuclear activism as a phenomenon deriving from what he considers to be scientifically indefensible social anxieties—for example, fears “of radiation and misunderstanding of its effects were powerful drivers of antinuclear sentiment.” He adds that such “fear was exacerbated by the Damoclean sword of nuclear war that hung over the world in the long years of the Cold War, as well as by the three accidents that have occurred at nuclear power plants”—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Rhodes also argues that these accidents “need not have happened,” and they can more rightly be viewed as failures of governance or management than of technology.
While the finer points of such an argument can be debated—technology is always mediated and managed by human institutions given to entropy—Rhodes is correct that nuclear power offers a very dramatic productive capacity relative to frequency of accidents.
Energy is an eminently readable and enjoyable book, one that almost feels like an extended evening chat with a well-read and lively great-uncle.
More promisingly (if also parenthetically), Rhodes briefly describes the current status and mechanisms of nuclear fusion, which—compared to fission—could offer a different, potentially cleaner source of energy for the future. “Controlled thermonuclear fusion—harnessing the fusion of light elements rather than the fission of heavy elements—is a hard problem,” Rhodes notes, because it requires temperatures in the millions of degrees. “As of 2018, no experimental fusion reactor has yet advanced beyond breakeven—meaning produced any net energy beyond the energy supplied to run the reactor.”
Researchers at the Massachussets Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems are working on this very problem, with the hope that it could serve as a cleaner source of energy in coming years.
Energy is an eminently readable and enjoyable book, one that almost feels like an extended evening chat with a well-read and lively great-uncle. As a history of important figures whose innovations were swept up into the dynamics of energy production in England and the United States, it is a volume from which individual chapters could be easily and usefully excerpted for teaching purposes. The shape of energy production in the 21st century will be conditioned partly by these legacies, even as it also remains to be written by current and future generations.
And there are, of course, lessons to be drawn from the past. If, as Rhodes notes, “United States energy consumption reached 70 percent wood in 1870, shifting to 70 percent coal by 1900,” then at least one such lesson is that dramatic energy transitions are, in fact, possible—even if the conditions of their possibility are myriad and the consequences of their deployment as yet unknown.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “From fire to fusion: the story of a species,” in the September 3, 2018, issue.
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