A Multi-Decillion Dollar Fine; Pouring Cold Water on Fusion; Helping in Disasters
Wednesday Brief - November 6, 2024
The Emblem of the Supreme Court of Russia.
An unfathomable fine
A Russian court recently imposed a fine on Google for about 20 decillion USD. A decillion is 1033. To put this astounding number into context, it is many times larger than the total number of grains of sand on earth. The fine was in response to Google removing 17 YouTube channels that it alleged were spreading Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine (the number of channel now exceeds 1,000).
The court ordered Google to restore the channels or face a fine each day it did not. Google did not comply, which led the court to this calculated penalty. Since the initial order, authorities have purportedly seized $100 million in Google’s assets and the company has almost fully abandoned any business there. Another major company, Yandex—often referred to as “Russia’s Google”—has also ceased operating in Russia.
A reasonable initial response to this story is bemusement at its absurdity. The fine exceeds the total GDP of the entire world by so many orders of magnitude that it would take longer than the current existence of the solar system to pay it. But there are two very dark implications emerging from it.
The first, and perhaps most obvious, one is that it illustrates how any corrupt government can seriously damage any company operating within its jurisdiction for ostensibly any reason. We may not hold many sympathies for Google, but plenty of companies with less morally blemished images operate in such places. Without the vast resources of a behemoth like Google, such a move could harm many workers in many places (not just the specific country) should a government choose to arbitrarily and capriciously target businesses.
A subtler issue is that a company with Google’s power can inflict considerable harm on a country for its own nefarious purposes. A while back, OpenAI threatened to withdraw from the EU over attempts to regulate it, which at the time would have prevented nearly all of Europe from accessing ChatGPT and other products. In that case, the result would probably have been just fine for the EU given the relative harm ChatGPT causes versus any good, but imagine if Google chooses to do the same at some point.
Google products are used in so many critical services that a complete pull out from a country could have devastating effects, especially if done rapidly. (The effects in Russia of Google leaving are hard to gauge given the disastrous consequences of the war there). By leveraging its ability to impose such injury, it can oppose any regulatory scheme it does not like. Google can effectively operate above the law and, by extension, against the will of whole communities.
The situation in Russia reveals the tension between allowing mega-corporations to exist and lacking any international framework for reigning in corrupt governments seeking to damage business interests on political complaints.
The fusion furor — still just a dream
Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley recently stated “As a physicist, we always joke that fusion has been 50 years away for 50 years.” In the last decade or so, there has been a significant uptick in interest in the technology, with some now proclaiming it is just five years away based on various breakthroughs.
Don’t believe the hype just yet.
Fusion as an energy source is so interesting because it is believed to be “safe, abundant, zero-carbon-emitting,” and reliable. The problem is that it is also nearly impossible. It is not impossible to conduct fusion, but the energy input necessary has for decades always vastly exceeded the output. That is why in November of 2022, numerous science news outlets joyously boasted “In a breakthrough experiment, nuclear fusion finally makes more energy than it uses” or similar headlines.
As always, the devil is in the details.
All the various news outlets that reported the breakthrough noted that the net energy gain was only calculated based on the energy input required by the reaction itself. Many stories largely downplayed the amount of energy necessary to operate the actual reactor, which is massive—300 times the energy produced in the best case scenario. On the reaction itself, only 4% of the inputted fuel was fused.
These results are both good and bad news. Achieving only 4% production suggests that whenever the process is improved the output quantity should also vastly improve. Unfortunately, it also means that we are a long way away from balancing the overall energy requirements to make fusion viable. Scientists and engineers will need to figure out how to decrease the massive amount of energy needed to operate a reactor plant while also not losing the efficacy of production. So far, to accomplish this initial victory researchers have spent many billions of dollars with only limited results.
This is not to say that scientists should cease pursuing this type of energy production, but like many “revolutionary” technologies, one should be especially skeptical of claims made by private interests. For example in 2019, Michl Binderbauer, CEO of the company formerly known as Tri Alpha Energy, claimed they were just “five years” away from commercializing fusion energy. Since the “breakthrough” in November 2022, no one has improved upon the input-output ratio by much.
First Light Fusion, a company in the UK, announced in April 2024 that it had developed a new methodology for conducting fusion through the process of inertial confinement fusion. Rather than adopting the traditional method of using a laser, they rely on a projectile gun that they presume will require less energy to run. The problem here is that they’ve only proven the concept, not built any working model that actually produces fusion.
John Platt, head of the Applied Science branch of Google Research, put the issue in a much more realistic perspective:
That’s wonderful and that’s great, because fusion has this potential for unlimited energy, but the problem with working so far back in the energy pipeline is that it might not really have an impact until 2050 in terms of percentage of electricity being made.
Even that might be overly optimistic.
San Francisco following an earthquake in 1906 (public domain)
Ever wonder how to help following a natural disaster?
I answer this question based on my years of experience working in the field of disaster response. Check it out here: A Rescuer’s Comment on Helping the Victims of the Hurricanes.
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See you Saturday!
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