Rebecca Ahrens
Writer & Editor
Photograph by Rebecca Ahrens

Writing

Selected Work

I write about the history of technology and industry and the innovations shaping the future of the industrial economy.

Our Industrial Life
China’s TMSR-LF1 fuses two nuclear breakthroughs in one reactor
In a remote corner of the Gobi Desert, near the city of Wuwei in China’s Gansu Province, a tiny 2 MW experimental nuclear reactor is humming along, quietly changing the course of nuclear power history.
 The history and future of the heat pump
How the humble heat pump made its journey from Victorian thought experiment to a modern-day sustainable heating essential.
Dot dot dash: 35 years that shrunk the world
“The laying of the telegraph cable is regarded, and most justly, as the greatest event in the present century, […] Now the great work is complete, the whole earth will be belted with electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and emotions. It shows that nothing is impossible to man.”
 The quantum leap: Why 2025 became the year everything changed
"Boardrooms are going to start asking about your quantum computing plans in 3, 2, 1."
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Criticism & features
Let It Go
On Nina Weijers' debut novel and the urge to understand the universe.
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017
 John Giorno, Poet
A feature on the poet and performance artist.
BOMB Magazine, 2017

Audio

Our Industrial Life Podcast

I started the Our Industrial Life podcast as Radio PI in 2020. It began as a one-woman show, which I wrote, produced, hosted, and edited as a labor of love. Over the years, it grew into a small team. Below are some of my favorite episodes.

Our Industrial Life · Selected Episodes
Dark matter and ghost particles—industrial data helps uncover the secrets of the universe
SNOLAB is the deepest clean lab in the world. It searches for the most elusive building blocks of our universe: neutrinos and dark matter. The Nobel Prize website describes its experiments as like searching for a particular grain of sand in the Sahara—and it relies on industrial data to do it.
 What the energy transition looks like from inside the grid
From 2007 to 2016, Steve Holliday was the CEO of the UK’s National Grid. In that time, the share of electricity generated by renewables in the UK grew from 3% to 16%. Today, that number is close to 40%. Rebecca and Joe talk to Steve about his time leading the National Grid through the beginning of the energy transition. They also get Steve’s perspective on some of the big questions around the future of the grid.
 The future of the power grid: Aging infrastructure
How do you put more power on an already strained and aging power grid? Our guests today say industrial software—and the data analysis it makes possible—is helping the grid increase capacity and accommodate sustainable power sources as we decarbonize.
 AI: A sustainability friend or environmental foe?
AI has been helping industries decarbonize for years by making their equipment more energy efficient and helping power grid operators incorporate more renewable energy sources. But, manufacturing, training and running the computers that power AI also produces a lot of carbon emissions. So, which is it? Is AI increasing or decreasing our industrial carbon footprint?
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I'm a writer, editor, and audio producer based in Berkeley. For a decade, I've covered technology and its impact on the industrial economy.

In 2020, I launched Our Industrial Life, a podcast where I talked with experts about how data, technology, and innovation keep the everyday parts of life running — from power grids and water systems to AI, nuclear energy, and particle physics.

In 2024, I began building Our Industrial Life into an independent brand and newsroom. We've since published 200+ articles, ranging from 16th-century mining to the startups now mining asteroids, from the Roman aqueducts to deep-sea desalination, from the origins of offshore drilling to the supercomputer inside oil giant Eni. Our biweekly newsletter reaches more than 100,000 readers, and our new LinkedIn edition reaches another 70,000.