Editor’s Note: Master Resource’s founder and editor, Rob Bradley, is currently struggling with the aftermath of torrential flooding in the Texas Hill Country. Until he can return to work, he has asked me to post “classic” MR entries. A blog post explaining Vaclav Smil’s concept of “power density” surely qualifies. This is the key concept for understanding a civilization’s energy needs.

Unfortunately, our MR files contain no concise explanation of the concept in layman’s language. (We have many explanations that no conceivable lay reader—myself most definitely included—could possibly understand or appreciate.) The closest thing I could find to a useful journalistic entry was a blog post by Kent Hawkins—a retired electrical engineer in Ontario—published on February 20, 2013. It is reprinted below.—Roger Donway, Managing Editor.

Power Density Separates the Wheat from the Chaff

By Kent Hawkins — February 20, 2013

“Power density (W/m²) is perhaps the most revealing variable in energetics…”[1]- Vaclav Smil

It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that understanding power density may be all the average person requires to put our energy sources and needs into perspective, but there is some merit in this argument.…

Editor’s Note: This book review was published just short of 20 years ago in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics [Vol. 8, No. 3 (FALL 2005): 93–95] by Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto.

“Austrian economists have so far contributed very little to energy studies…. This book could therefore go a long way in providing a new set of concrete economic examples and principles for use in classroom discussions.”

Despite its obvious economic and social importance, energy (broadly understood) is an understudied field. True, among academics, one can find several engineers and geologists, along with some economists, geographers, legal scholars, and political scientists, who devote much of their research efforts to devising and/or analyzing various energy-related technologies, supply sources, markets, and institutions.

By and large, however, very few individuals have tried to understand how all the various parts of the energy puzzle fit—or not—together, and much—if not most—of the public discussion of the issue is agenda-driven and ignorant of basic physical and economic principles.…

“My aim is to finish projects to offer a comprehensive, reliable foundation for future energy scholars to expand and improve upon. Many specific episodes can be studied in greater depth, and future events will require analysis.”

This week is a birthday of note for me. Looking back at a half-century of interest in energy history and public policy, I thank my lucky stars and celebrate a worldview–classical liberalism–that has held up very well over time. It is not how smart you are; it is the ability to discern between a false narrative and objective reality. And with a reliable framework to understand the world, blue-collar research was the wide-open opportunity for me. I have never looked back.

My odyssey began with an Ayn Rand novel in high school on individualism. That got me to free-market economics in college.…

“What’s lacking are the products – the SMRs. It’s not the government’s job to pick winners and losers in the race to develop the products. That’s how free markets are supposed to work.”

The Department of Energy last Tuesday (March 24) announced a $900 million pot of money to “de-risk the deployment of Generation III+ light-water small modular reactors (Gen III+ SMR).” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said (although it’s more likely someone wrote the words for him), “America’s nuclear energy renaissance starts now.”

Really? The new solicitation is a dead ringer for the Biden administration’s October 2024 $900 SMR solicitation, in many cases word-for-word, including a ‘two-tier’ structure: $800 million for the first, $100 million for the second. The residue of the Biden initiative has been scrubbed from DOE’s website, probably in hopes that no one would remember it.…