Tomorrowland (13 page)

Molnar’s stabilizer solved only part of the problem. He could land in a congested area, but he still had to evade traffic on his way out. “I took a very realistic approach to this question. Since vertical takeoff is too limiting, and no one’s going to build a long runway in places like downtown Los Angeles, then flying away isn’t the solution. You need to be able to drive. This is where the motorcycle comes in: If you drive away on a motorcycle you can
split lanes. It’s the fastest way to get away from traffic, and it’s legal in twenty-five countries.”

What makes the motorcycle even more interesting is the engine. Motorcycle engines are cheap (a new one costs around $2,000, versus $36,000 for most aircraft engines), powerful, durable, quiet, get great gas mileage, and — their best feature — are standardized. “Because these engines always have to fit between the driver’s legs,” says Molnar, “manufacturers devote tremendous time and energy into making them within these limits, while simultaneously making them increasingly more powerful. They’re constantly getting better, and you can get them fixed at any roadside shop. It’s a perfect solution.”

All of these ideas came together in the vehicle Molnar wheeled onto the tarmac that October afternoon. And the test drive went exactly according to plan. The one-cylinder engine and propeller generated more than enough wind to push the vehicle past the 50 mph mark. A series of road tests confirmed that it could master the freeways (the two-wheeled bike did 90 mph no problem; the newer tri-wheeled configuration goes 160 mph and handles like a sports car). Because of his engine choice, Molnar also evaded a problem that plagued both Moller and Terrafugia — his vehicle passed a smog test. The bike was street legal. Now, it was time to see if it could fly.

3.

First flight took place in Texas in 2005, with video of the event available all over the Internet. Again, everything went according to plan. The crew logged four hours of flight time without a mishap, so Molnar started thinking about production.

Originally, his plan was to sell single-seat models, constructed from kits. But while he waited for his patent to clear (it did, in 2011), his backers wanted to explore upscale markets — which
meant two seats, room for cargo, and all kinds of doodads. So Molnar and his partners spent a couple years working on that design, simultaneously trying to convince the FAA that gyroplanes could be engineered safe enough to be sold as turn-key light sport aircraft. But the FAA wouldn’t budge, so Molnar went back to his roots.

“I decided,” he says, “that this had to be a DIY project. The FAA won’t allow a ready-made gyroplane, but tens of thousands of aircraft that are now flying are homebuilt, and the FAA regulations allow gyroplanes that are built from kits. Plain and simple, I had a machine that could fly and drive, but if it was going to help launch the flying car revolution, then DIY’ers will need to assemble their own to push it forward.”

Unlike traditional kit airplanes, which often take five years to assemble in a hangar, Molnar believes his design could be snapped together in a garage in less than four weeks. But, before the kit is available, there is still work to do. “The machine has been invented, driven, flown, and patented, but it hasn’t been engineered for production, or optimized.” Right now, for example, because the process is not yet streamlined, it takes about ten minutes to re-position the rotor blades and wheels to go from driving to flying. But this is where Molnar’s business plan deviates further from most flying carmakers. Instead of trying to drum up the necessary financing for mass production, Molnar wants to establish a gyrocycle racing league populated entirely by kit builders.

“Sure, it’s not a huge market like toothpaste, but this is not a machine for grandmothers picking up groceries. It’s for skydivers and guys who ride Ninjas. And that’s exactly what I want. These people live for adventure, they know they’re on the cutting edge, and consider what happens if we’re successful: Suddenly the chuckle factor is gone from the flying car discussion. In its place, you get all the optimization and engineering that results from any race program, and nobody streamlines better than a racing pit crew.”

4.

What is the true size of the flying car market? Nobody really knows. There are estimates that put it in the high billions, but usually those best guesses are reserved for vehicles capable of vertical takeoff and landing. “The Zee-Aero is one of those,” says Molnar, citing another recent entrant in the space. The brainchild of NASA aerospace engineer Ilan Kroo, the Zee-Aero has a canard wing design and eight propellers for lift. In photos released online, it appears to be a very sexy machine. “The Zee-Aero would be great,” continues Molnar. “It’d be the real-deal commuter model. But right now it’s only theoretical. And even if they did get it into production, it would cost millions of dollars.”

Molnar, on the other hand, has built a machine that can fly high enough to clear tall mountains and drive fast enough to give Formula One racers a run for their money. And it’s here today. Molnar, in fact, is about to take it on a cross-country trip. A few years from now, you’ll be able to assemble one from a kit and do the same. It is both the stuff of very old dreams and the very first flying vehicle that’s actually available to the masses. So get your
Blade Runner
quotes ready.

Meltdown or Mother Lode

THE POSSIBILITIES OF NUCLEAR ENERGY

Nuclear fusion, the energy released when two atoms collide, is gods’ fire, both the fuel that powers the stars and the all-star light in “Let there be light.” Nuclear fission, meanwhile, is the energy released when an atom is subdivided. It is our attempt to steal fire from the gods, and a story so muddled that there are arguably none left among us with an unbiased opinion about it.

The problems with these opinions are growing: overpopulation, global warming, resource scarcity, to name but a few. Many smart scientists claim that nuclear energy is the only way through these crises. Plenty disagree. But lost in all this fuss is a four-decade revolution in the science of gods’ fire — call it Prometheus 2.0 — that promises a next wave of nuclear power: cleaner, safer, and less vulnerable to terrorist attack or natural disaster. This wave is startling in its implications, arguably the most exciting shift in energy since we replaced blubber with steam. But the story is complicated and controversial, and to truly understand this radical next, we first must decipher the bewildering past. In this, it helps to start at the beginning.

1.

First there was the atom.

The idea of the fundamental particle came from India, dating to sixth-century BCE Hindu philosopher Kanada, but it was the Greek thinker Democritus who gave us the word, taking
atom
from
atomos
, Greek for “indivisible.” This concept of an indivisible particle, a fundamental building block for all of nature, had staying power, holding fast for nearly two thousand years — then crumbling within thirty.

Things got wobbly in the late 1890s, when, in short succession, researchers discovered X-rays, radioactivity, and, finally, the first radioactive elements. Then, in 1905, Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity proposed that a large amount of energy could be stored in a very small amount of matter. Twenty-seven years later, Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft verified this suspicion and proved Democritus wrong. Turns out, the atom is divisible.

In 1935, Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd leveraged this knowledge to build the Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor. It went — and you’ve got to love this word — “critical” on December 2, 1942. In 1951, an experiment in Idaho, dubbed EBR-I, became the first reactor to produce electricity. EBR-I melted down in 1955 — also another first — though not many people outside of Idaho noticed. Instead, Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech and US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss’s promise of electricity “too cheap to meter” had us dazzled. The nuclear age was upon us.

Calder Hall, in England, started pumping out an annual 50 megawatts and the world had its first commercial nuclear power station. The following year, the US got reactors in Pennsylvania and California, and not coincidentally the Price-Anderson Act passed, limiting the financial risk of nuclear-plant owners in the event of a catastrophe. Historians feel that the industry really arrived on November 9, 1965, when a blackout left the Northeastern United States without electricity for twelve hours. Add in the brownouts of the early 1970s and it’s no surprise that 1973 was a banner year for the industry: Forty-one new plants ordered, and no end in sight.

But then, an end in sight. “China Syndrome” is shorthand hyperbole for what happens when an American nuclear reactor melts down — it melts straight through to China. The disaster movie of the same name came out on March 16, 1979, twelve days before “Unit 2” at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island partially melted down. It wasn’t a winning combination.

Not long after, when
Mad Magazine
’s Alfred E. Newman posed in front of Three Mile Island’s cooling towers with the caption, “Yes, me worry,” he spoke for much of the country. In 1984, a
Forbes
cover story called the nuclear industry “the largest managerial disaster in business history.” In 1986, Ukraine’s Chernobyl became a bigger disaster and, as Allan Winkler points out in his book,
Life Under A Cloud
, “Some Americans masked their concerns with black humor: ‘What’s the weather report from Kiev? Overcast and 10,000 degrees.’ ”

Popular wisdom holds that Three Mile Island slowed the industry, while Chernobyl ground it to a halt, but nuclear experts feel that cost overruns were a much worse problem. In the end, it didn’t matter. Dozens of new plants were cancelled. One became a coal factory. In America, no new plants have been ordered in over thirty years. As far as most are concerned, that was the end of the story.

2.

This might have stayed the end of that story except, in the early 2000s, we started hearing other tales. Global warming, peak oil, resource wars — the list goes on. And it’s this list that’s put the nuclear option back on the table, a process well summarized by Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss in a recent
Wired
article: “Burning hydrocarbons is a luxury that a planet with six billion energy-hungry souls can’t afford. There is only one sane, practical alternative: nuclear power.”

Many feel the same. Both the previous Bush administration and the current Obama administration back the nuclear option, as do an increasing number of serious environmentalists like Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Gaia theorist James Lovelock, and eco-author Bill McKibben. Congress as well. In 2007, they gave the nuclear industry $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for up to 80 percent of the cost of new units. Since then, US power companies have submitted applications for 30 new plants. Worldwide, there are 31 new plants under construction and even more promised. China alone has plans for 26. All of this, the experts say, might signal the end of our energy woes or the end of the world — no one is quite sure which.

Among the stakes in this debate are deep-seated fears about nuclear safety and security, and the boatload of regulations meant to allay those fears. Since the cost of licensing a new reactor in America is roughly $1 billion, as Heritage Foundation nuclear energy analyst Jack Spenser explains: “Those regulations amount to an industry killer.”

This discussion is still ongoing, but some believe misdirected. “When most people argue about nuclear energy,” says energy expert and author Tom Blees, “they’re arguing about Three Mile Island and 1970s technology — which is about when the US nuclear industry ground to a halt. But research didn’t die off, just new
construction. We’re two generations beyond that earlier tech and the changes have been massive.”

In light of all this, the better question might be: What do we mean by safe and secure?

3.

We use a lot of energy. A
lot
of energy. Thus, if you want to talk safety and security, you have to start with the options available. Can solar and wind even satisfy our needs? Can green techs ever handle base load demands? Will better energy storage systems soon come online? Hard to say. As a result of this uncertainty, most experts frame the discussion as coal versus nukes. “Nukes win every time,” says retired Argonne National Laboratory nuclear physicist, George Stanford. “Fifty-six people died outright at Chernobyl. We could have three or four of those a year and not do the damage coal does.”

New York Times
journalist and author of
Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Power
Gwyneth Cravens explains further: “If an American got all his or her lifetime electricity solely from nuclear power, that person’s share of waste would fit into one soda can. If an American got all his or her electricity from coal, that person’s waste would weigh 68.5 tons and fit into six 12-ton railroad cars. And their share of carbon dioxide coal emissions would come to 77 tons.” Nukes, meanwhile, have virtually no carbon footprint.

Coal is also a serious pollutant, containing arsenic, mercury, lead, and a host of radioactive materials — uranium, thorium, and radium at levels 100 to 400 times the level of nuclear plants — yet remains exempt from hazardous-waste regulations. 24,000 people die coal-related deaths in the US each year. In China, it’s 400,000. “Worldwide,” says Cravens, “nuclear power is responsible for the fewest deaths of all large-scale energy production.”

Settling this debate may take some time — and since time is the one luxury both sides agree we don’t have — there are heated arguments about the best way forward. Greens feel that any energy dollar not directed toward renewables is a dollar wasted, while the pro-nuke camp thinks the same about new reactors. But still, even if we do move forward with new reactors, there are a bevy of economic concerns to address.

“The first 75 reactors in the US had $100 billion in cost overruns,” says Jim Riccio, a nuclear spokesman for Greenpeace. “The nuclear industry has received over $100 billion in government subsidies [that’s roughly $13 billion a plant, or, actually, the cost of a new plant] and still can’t find a way to make money.” The industry counters by arguing that every new business goes through growing pains and the 103 reactors currently operating in the US all do so at 90 percent capacity — up from 60 percent in the days of Three Mile Island. But this doesn’t seem to impress would-be backers. In a recent article on the topic,
Time
pointed out: “The red-hot renewable industry — including wind and solar — last year attracted $71 billion in private investment, the nuclear industry attracted nothing,” then quoted energy expert and chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute Amory Lovins on the subject: “Wall Street has spoken — nuclear power isn’t worth it.”