DECEMBER 12, 2022 – Nuclear fusion. Sorry to burst your bubble. With a title like “Big News!” doubtless you were half-expecting . . . big news. If it’s not exactly how we or the media would define “big news,” tomorrow’s official announcement about a breakthrough in harnessing energy produced by nuclear fusion is a critical step toward an achievement that will alter the course of civilization.
Decades ago, scientists mastered the science of nuclear fission (splitting the atom), but they’re still at work trying to manage nuclear fusion (fusing atoms together). For a glimpse of the latter process, you need glance only at the sun, but to make it happen here on earth has been beyond our capacity until now. The “big news” is that recently, using lasers scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have successfully completed a fusion experiment producing a net energy gain. According to my source (Reuters), which, in turn, identified its source as one of three sources “familiar with the matter,” the “break-through” result has to be cranked up 100-fold to be commercially viable. I’m not sure what “100 times” means in this context: working another 100 years? Building a laser 100 times more powerful? Rounding up $100 billion to fund further research? What I am sure about is that once nuclear fusion is mastered, clean energy will become limitless.
Sounds sketchy, I know; hardly “big news” in the way that “real-life [“real-dead”?] Lazarus comes to life in front of thousands in the heart of Times Square” would lead the next hourly cycle of cable news. Yet, the fact that scientists are now a step closer in the arduous process of taming nuclear fusion is worthy of special attention.
In my non-scientific mind, the “big news” on the fusion front should give us hope for the survival and prosperity of our species.
First, the work on nuclear fusion is another reminder of how a technological achievement can vastly improve our prospects. Just when our despair is greatest on the highway to climate catastrophe, for example, scientists and engineers give promise to a dramatic turnaround. Why not, then, hope for technological solutions in our many other arenas of gloom? Given how integrated the world has become—via travel, communication, economics—our problems have likewise become interwoven. A “game-changing” technological change in one sector can produce a wide-changing effect in many others.
Second, fully harnessed, nuclear fusion—the über-renewable energy source—will finally cut the outsized clout of tyrants such as M.S. of Saudi Arabia and the man who would be the modern Tsar “of all the Russias [including Ukraine]” In broader terms, the chokehold that oil has on the world economy would be broken, and the positive effects on the world order would be inestimable.
When you read or hear tomorrow’s announcement, don’t hold your breath. You’ll need another few intakes of oxygen before our carbon footprints shrink as much as they must. But know that there’s new support for the aphorism, “Hope springs eternal.”
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
