Many watched helplessly this past summer as St. Louis suffered through a torturous blackout and dozens of Californians died during an unprecedented heat wave that sapped electrical power and immobilized the grid in places.
Meanwhile, one of the terminals at LaGuardia Airport in New York lost power due to the heat, causing flights to be canceled. Heat also buckled the third rail on the Queens subway line, causing a power failure that forced the evacuation of 70 people.
As the heat continued unabated across much of the nation, eight square miles of Queens went dark for a week, while in California, the Fresno County hospitals were filled, and the morgue ran out of room.
While all this was going on, plans were moving forward to correct the problem permanently by creating a national supergrid to carry power to wherever it’s needed cleanly and efficiently.
More than just an electrical grid, the supergrid would also be a pipeline for liquid hydrogen, whose low temperature would cool superconducting wires able to carry unprecedented amounts of electricity without any loss to resistance and heat.
The idea of a continental supergrid was first proposed by Chauncey Starr — one of the pioneers of nuclear power.1 Starr worked on the original Manhattan Project and then started nuclear power companies in the United States and Europe. He was the first person outside the military to build a nuclear reactor and has been a proponent of that power source ever since.
Nuclear power is at the heart of the supergrid concept. Nuclear power plants developed a bad reputation in some circles in the wake of accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. But the latest technology has evolved to the point that it makes accidents like those impossible. The older reactors used water to cool the nuclear core; if the water level fell, the core overheated.
The newest nuclear power plants, called Generation Four high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors, don’t use water at all. They have a built-in feature that causes the nuclear reaction to be self-limiting. As the temperature rises, the reaction slows, eventually stopping before a meltdown could ever occur, making these reactors inherently safe. Moreover, they don’t need to be near a body of water for cooling.2
The design of the supergrid places a cluster of high-output...
