Martin Lukas

Thinking unideologically about solutions for the present and future - when #persuasion, #confirmationbias and #cognitivedissonance don't get the better of me

[Martin Lukas @realMartinLukas]

"Don't destroy the means of correcting errors is the base of morality"

I really like this view: it's as good an argument for free speech, democracy and markets as any.

@DavidDeutschOxf & @naval

https://t.co/LaTjdIXJHq

[Tim Latimer @TimMLatimer]

I wrote about the phenomenal drilling results of our @FervoEnergy Sawtooth 7 well announced last week, how it fits into our tech roadmap, and what the geothermal industry can learn from @SpaceX approach to tech deployment. https://t.co/GBG4sNV4Ov

[Matt Loszak @MattLoszak]

Very excited to announce that at 12:20am on the 4th of July, Aalo achieved criticality on our first full-scale reactor.

We cut it close, but we pulled it off!!

Working towards this goal with such an incredible group of humans has been the most fulfilling period of my life. This moment has been three years in the making.

Last year, Executive Order 14301 called for at least three new reactors to go critical before July 4th, 2026.

As of late last Friday night, that goal has been surpassed!

When the EO was announced, we immediately sat down to figure out what the most ambitious scope would be, while still being potentially achievable by July 4th.

Some of the team proposed doing simplified designs with smaller fuel loads, or building in existing facilities.

One thing was clear: We wouldn't have time to integrate a full-scale sodium heat-removal loop to bring the reactor to its full 30 MWt.

So here’s where we landed:

➡️ We purchased the entire commercial-scale fuel load. This is enough fuel to operate at 30 MWt / 10 MWe for 3 years before refueling. To my knowledge, it’s the largest fuel load that’s been taken critical in the DOE pilot program, by far.

➡️ We built a full-scale reactor vessel in our factory, and loaded in our commercial graphite layout. All the dimensions, vessel thickness, and manufacturing techniques are essentially the same as we will use for the imminent commercial version. There will be a few minor tweaks for sodium flow and full-power, but nothing major.

➡️ We built an entirely new reactor facility at the Idaho National Lab. Building a building is easy. Building a new reactor facility comes with a mountain of paperwork, policies, operation and training procedures, security, instrumentation and control, and more.

Zero-power criticality might seem like a small step, but I can tell you, going through the exercise of building a reactor and taking it to criticality has been extremely valuable.

The learnings on regulatory, ops, manufacturing, supply chain, QA, economics, engineering, and design will accelerate our path through to the final iteration at full-power.

America is blessed to have a recent Cambrian explosion of startups in nuclear, all going after different markets, technologies, and strategies.

I’m excited that sodium, gas, salt, and new PWRs are all getting pushed forward once again. The best outcome for humanity is to have all these advance in parallel, as quickly as possible, while maintaining safety.

Thanks again to our amazing team, DOE, INL, BEA, and everyone else who helped us get to where we are today.

This could not have happened anywhere else. Happy birthday, America!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

There has never been a better time for nuclear energy. The Second Atomic Age has begun, and this one will be here to stay.

[Martin Lukas @realMartinLukas]

Happy 250th Birthday to the greatest experiment in human history!

[The Honest Broker @RogerPielkeJr]

This is a point I’ve been making for decades

Climate change is a risk management problem not a prediction problem

From The Climate Fix 2010

[Alex Trembath @atrembath]

The energy transition will not proceed in the way that climate advocates imagined over the last decade, but if they let it, AI could do more for electrification and decarbonization than the Green New Deal or the IRA was ever going to.

[Ted Nordhaus @TedNordhaus]

A reminder that what these single event attribution claims are really saying is not that climate change caused a heat wave that would not have occurred in the absence of climate change. Only that in the absence of climate change, the current heat wave in France would not have been quite as extreme.

[U.S. Department of Energy @ENERGY]

The Energy Department is delivering on President Trump’s Agenda to Reinvigorate the Nuclear Industrial Base:

Today, @DOE_EDF announced financing that will help rebuild America’s nuclear supply chain and accelerate the deployment of 10 new large-scale reactors.

[Martin Lukas @realMartinLukas]

$1 100 000 000 000

For owning 85% of all capacity to transport mass to orbit, almost all future orbital compute, the best electric cars, the greatest platform for the exchange of ideas, the most sophisticated communication network ever created and a lot of total intelligence on the planet.

Also: maybe the mightiest potential weapons platform (orbital strikes), neural interfaces, tunnels, and maybe the best suited company to make solar energy to earth a reality.

Well earned, @elonmusk.

[Fox News @FoxNews]

BREAKING: Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire.

After SpaceX raised a record $75 billion in its IPO, Musk’s net worth shot up to top $1.1 trillion when the stock began trading Friday, putting him in an economic class of his own.

Combined with his holdings in electric vehicle maker Tesla, as well as other investments and assets, Musk's net worth is now estimated at about $1.1 trillion.

Musk's stake in the rocket and satellite company alone is now estimated at a staggering $690 billion, but it's also a life-changing moment for thousands of workers at the company who hold equity.

Investors who watched Musk help turn Tesla into an automotive giant are now betting he can do the same in space and artificial intelligence, as SpaceX launches the largest IPO in history.

[World Nuclear News @W_Nuclear_News]

The US Department of @Energy has formally approved @xcimerenergy's preconceptual design and technology development roadmap milestone for Athena, the company's architecture for #fusion power plants #nuclear https://t.co/cn8xFmueAT

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

Real banger from Sacred Cow BBQ on the problem of social sciences and humanities being largely immune to reality correction because there’s no feedback loop that penalizes people for being wrong. The incentive structure rather rewards people for intra-guild argumentative sophistication and coalition-building, which in many cases are ideological or actively reality-resistant. There are real reform efforts afoot, and that is good, though they’re largely happening outside of formal sites of academic knowledge production, e.g., Substack rather than academic journals.

This one amply rewards your attention!

https://t.co/y4vv90Ip3H

[Martin Lukas @realMartinLukas]

@pmarca One of the hardest skills to develop is the ability to tell good news from bad ones.

[Antares @AntaresNuclear]

https://t.co/MygqwoDdn9

[Commonwealth Fusion Systems @CFS_energy]

Today, we laid the physics foundation for our ARC fusion power plant. ⚛️

With 5 deeply researched papers — validated by independent peer review and published in the Journal of Plasma Physics — we’ve shown we've nailed the scientific basics of producing copious amounts of fusion power.

The collective assessment from our 58 co-authors? This machine will work.

No scientific breakthroughs are required to bring this clean, secure, abundant source of energy to the grid. Here is how we're handling fusion's biggest challenges:

⚡ Powering the Grid: Using extremely strong magnets, ARC will confine the plasma long enough to generate 1.1 GW of fusion power. We'll convert that into 400 MW of continuous net electricity — enough to power ~280,000 average American homes.

🛡️ Handling Heat Exhaust: To control a superhot, unruly cloud of charged particles, we're utilizing proven methods to safely handle the heat exhaust that acts as a key practical constraint for tokamaks.

✅ Managing Disruptions: We aren't trying to build an operationally perfect machine. We are pragmatically designing ARC to safely handle disruptions and keep the plasma stable for top performance.

🏗️ Proving the Approach: We're building on decades of tokamak research and supercomputer simulations. And we're proving our approach right now with SPARC, the tokamak we are actively building in Massachusetts.

With our transparency, you don’t have to take our assertions on faith. We are really pushing fusion forward.

[Tim Latimer @TimMLatimer]

Fantastic news to see the Geothermal Energy Advancement Act pass the House with broad bipartisan support.

This is the kind of smart policy that will rapidly accelerate deployment in the geothermal sector.
https://t.co/txQ6Wrh5Zw

[Prime Movers Lab @PrimeMoversLab]

Congrats to @FocusedEnergy_1 on a landmark $240M round — the largest fully secured Series A in the history of global fusion energy. This is a major step toward making laser fusion an industrial reality. Proud to have been a partner on this journey. 🔬📷

Read the release here: https://t.co/WEqcrxqRET

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Whitepill.

[Fusion Industry Association @Fusion_Industry]

Today, the FIA submitted its letter to the @NRCgov in support of their proposed final rule for the regulation of fusion machines. This is a milestone moment that will culminate in the permanent and complete separation of fusion energy from nuclear fission

[SuperCritical @1SuperCritical]

📍 SuperCritical Materials Joins @TerraPraxis REPOWER Consortium to Scale the Nuclear Fuel Infrastructure Required for the AI-Energy Era

Read more: https://t.co/CnMlT5WcHF

[The Honest Broker @RogerPielkeJr]

Just published at THB

Link in reply