Most of us here have lived through the development of a technology that can be described as world-changing, impacting for good and for ill the way we conduct our economic and personal lives. The information revolution–with its computers, internet, cell phones, and other associated gadgets and applications–has altered how we work, socialize, entertain ourselves, learn, and even do our Christmas shopping.
As we look forward in our annual New Year’s exercise, we can see that 2022 may have marked the birth of the next world-changing technology: nuclear fusion, which has the potential to generate safe, pollution-free, cheap, and unlimited energy.
You know how electrically-charged objects have both positive and negative poles. If you take two magnets and align the two positive poles, they will repel each other. if you push them together, you will feel the resisting force. This is energy. On the atomic level, if you push two positively-charged protons together, they release energy. If you can push them together so that they fuse with each other, lots of energy is released.
In fact, this is why stars, including our sun, release so much energy. These gaseous bodies are so massive, they compress hydrogen, which consists of one proton and one electron, so much that the atoms fuse into helium, giving off enormous amounts of light and heat.
If we could do what a star does, we could generate as much energy as we want. Hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe. We have plenty of it stored in water, a molecule of which consists of two hydrogen atoms joined to one oxygen atom, hence, H2O .
In fact, we have fused hydrogen atoms. The problem has been that it has taken more energy to achieve fusion than it gives off. Theoretically, we could get more energy than we put in, but we hadn’t been able to pull that off.
Until December 5, 2022. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), scientists and engineers employed by the U.S. Department of Energy, fused hydrogen atoms in such a way that they produced more energy than they put into the system.
As Jim Geraghty explains it, in a lab the size of a sports stadium, the scientists used 192 lasers to zap a target the size of a pencil eraser. The target contained deuterium, the “heavy hydrogen” variety that has a neutron in addition to the one proton in the normal hydrogen atom and that is abundant in ordinary water. All of these lasers used 2.1 megajoules of energy, but they produced 2.5 megajoules. Not that much, perhaps, but it amounts to a gain of 120%.
Geraghty, who is not a starry-eyed futurist but a conservative practical kind of guy, writing for National Review, is excited about the prospects of this technology, which he admits may take decades of more work before it becomes usable. He quotes Andrew Follett who said that operational fusion energy would potentially be “too cheap to meter.” He also quotes aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, who is nearly utopian about what this technology could mean:
The reason we need fusion is to destroy the Malthusian belief system, which, in my estimation, is the preeminent threat to human civilization today. If one accepts the idea that resources are limited, then all nations are fundamentally enemies, and the only issue is who is going to kill whom in order to claim what’s available. At bottom, this was the source of the major catastrophes of the 20th century. It could cause far worse in the 21st. This mindset, however, is false. We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who think there are too many people.
Fusion power can save us by utterly refuting the limited-resource thesis. The amount of deuterium fusion fuel present in one gallon of water contains as much energy as that produced by burning 350 gallons of gasoline. That’s all water on earth, fresh or salt. A gallon of water from Mars contains deuterium with the energy content of 2,000 gallons of gasoline. Other planets or asteroids may offer more still. So what we are talking about with fusion is unlimited energy. With enough energy, you can do anything. In the entire history of human civilization we have not used up a single kilogram of iron or aluminum. We have just degraded some matter from more convenient to less convenient forms. With enough energy, we can rearrange it back, recycling it faster and faster from one form to another. We will never run out of anything.
Furthermore, fusion does not simply represent unlimited energy — it is a new kind of energy with which we could do things that we simply can’t do now. With fusion power, for instance, we could create fusion rockets, which could attain speeds up to 10 percent the speed of light, opening our path to the stars.
Repealing the laws of economics, which have been described in terms of scarcity, as the allocation of limited resources? That would be a big deal, with consequences that we cannot imagine. We must be suspicious of utopias. Techno-utopias can never solve the human problem of sin, which has a way of spoiling our most impressive achievements.
And the latest fusion breakthrough and such optimistic projections have attracted skeptics. Science journalist Geoff Brumfiel argue that the true energy gain, when everything is calculated together, was more like 1%. And explains why the technical problems of applying this experiment practically are enormous and will likely take decades to solve. See also this article.
But still, this breakthrough was something good to come out of 2022. And it may well be significant for the years ahead.
Illustration: Nuclear Fusion by Someone, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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