The Future Miracles of Nuclear Fusion

“Or a relatively new tech story that caught my eye”

This is something I wanted to get to since it first caught my attention back in December, but more “pressing” things got in the way. Like Motorhead. Or traditions of the Czech people. Or that overly long essay on color theory/pre-revolution Russian photography. And it was too close to the last science post I did, anyway. You remember that, right? On how lab-grown meat is probably not going to happen soon, actually? And I cry at night because of it? Yeah, you remember that one.

Well, we’re doing it again! More things for me to cry about because I’ll never live to see them succeed and/or something stupid (i.e. capitalism) will get in the way of their success! Or, in the case of the second topic I want to cover someday in the coming weeks, I cry at night because the future prospects are so existentially terrifying that I wonder if very soon my chosen profession of writing won’t be obsolete entirely. But let’s be optimistic for a little bit, shall we? Dog knows the world (and this blog) has already got a bit too much pessimism for its own good. I’m gonna try being excited for once instead, and wave my arms around like an oversized Kermit the Frog. Because, I’ll let you in on a little secret, when I first saw the headlines for “NUCLEAR FUSION SUCCESS,” I just about peed my pants and screamed a little. Don’t let my doubts give you the wrong idea; that shit is genuinely one of the most hopeful stories I’ve read in ages.

Nuclear fusion is something that’s been on my mind for the better part of fifteen years. Ever since I started reading science fiction, and later environmental science stuff, nuclear fusion became that pie-in-the-sky hope that, one day, there really could be one thing that solves all the world’s problems. Because if college taught me anything, it’s that a) if you’re smart you have at least thirty seconds to get outside before projectile vomiting, and b) there is no “silver bullet” solution to climate change. There’s no silver bullet band, either. Bob Seger, you can eat your heart out.

Basically, for every “simple” solution to a problem, like finding a renewable, clean source of energy, there’s a bunch of little problems that crop up. Damming rivers for hydropower? Great, but you’ve just ruined the ecosystem of the entire river. Capturing weather with wind turbines? Awesome, hope you don’t mind exploding bats from the inside out. Lorde’s 2021 single solar power? Love it, but you better start investing in lithium ion batteries. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, is funky compared to other renewables because its only downside seems to be that it’s fucking impossible to do. But we’re one giant leap closer to that now, after the major Department of Energy breakthrough in December of 2022.

See, believe it or not, I actually support nuclear power. I’ve mentioned it a few times before, but that may sound incongruous with the other left-leaning environmentalist flair that I plaster on just about everything this blog has. That’s a whole other story, really. And that’s nuclear fission, mind you. The way nuclear power plants work is by taking fissile material (classically, uranium and plutonium) and smashing atoms together until they explode. You’re cracking the really, really heavy, dense atoms of uranium and plutonium and splitting them into lighter atoms, and taking that extra energy left over to boil water. Since atoms are so energy dense, and there are so many of them in a very tiny space, it’s easy to get enormous amounts of energy out of just a little bit of material (see: a fucking bomb). The downside to nuclear power is that you still have to mine it and it does produce some pretty hazardous waste. But, hey, I’ll take a few cubic feet of nuclear waste of a planet’s worth of carbon dioxide. Did you know some estimates put the number of deaths you can directly attribute to fossil fuels as high as 100 million and counting? Nuclear power, on the other hand? Less than 0.1% of that.

By the way, I saw it floating around on the internet that all of human history is just more and more complicated ways to boil water and turn an engine to produce electricity. This is true. And nuclear fusion does the same thing; heats water to make steam to turn the turbines and make electricity. It’s just the “how” of heating the water that’s different.

Nuclear fusion, the fancy pie-in-the-sky one, is smashing little atoms together to make heavier atoms, instead of splitting them apart. It is, effectively, the opposite of nuclear fission. It’s the same way the sun works; taking really light atoms, like hydrogen and helium, and forcing them to make out until you steam up the car windows and eventually just have one atom left, and then taking all that extra heat and spending it on movie tickets or something. I don’t know, I lost control of the metaphor. But you see how much frickin’ energy the sun has. That shit is just giving the energy away. The sun doesn’t care! It’s got so much nuclear fusion going on it just screams into the void of space for a billion years and steams up the car windows of the entire solar system. So if we could replicate that here on Earth? Therein lies the dream; theoretically, nuclear fusion could supply us with infinite energy.

The problem with it for the last ten thirty fifty forever years is that the Earth, and our scientific labs, don’t have the immense, unimaginably crushing pressure of, say, the center of the sun. It takes a lot of energy to get those atoms to make out. Like, the entire gravity of a celestial body kind of energy, normally. So any sort of nuclear fusion attempt has always had the issue of putting in more energy than we get out; the energy produced ends up being less than the energy needed to start the fusion reaction in the first place. But in December of 2022, for the first time in recorded history, scientists were able to get more energy out of the reaction than they put in. I don’t think I can properly stress just how mind-bogglingly important this is.

Again; if we could get a sustained fusion reaction, we could, in theory, take a canister of birthday balloon helium and power a fucking city. It is truly as close as we could get to infinite energy. Do you know how many problems that would solve? Like, all of them. Screw fossil fuels and their greenhouse gases; there’s a new power in town. Running out of water? Just desalinate some ocean water; it’s not like we’re running out of energy or something. Are summers too hot now that the world has warmed? Turn up that AC; the power’s free. I envision a world where everyone across the entire planet has access to the kind of power supply that we have here in the US, at will, for free. And that this immense power usage is supplied by something with an ecological footprint that’s tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold less than the power supplies we use today. Of course, under capitalism, we’ll likely never see power that is truly free. But that’s the last, not least, of our worries, because the scientists have to get it working first.

There’s a saying that “Nuclear fusion has been thirty years away for the last thirty years,” or something along those lines, because, much like lab-grown meat from last time, breakthroughs come and go all the time. Getting around those last handful of hurdles may very well be actually, physically impossible. We got more energy than we put in, sure, but can we sustain that ad infinitum? Can the technology used to complete that task be made marketable, or even scalable, for local, regional, or national use? Could it be a replacement for fossil fuels and conventional renewable energies, or will it always only be supplemental? Since we can’t make new hydrogen or helium, do we have enough existing sources to last into the future? How do we stop new corporations from co-opting and strongman-ing their way into the commodification and monopolization of fusion energy distribution, like they did with, uh, every other energy distribution? Or water? Or food? Or trains, of all fucking things? And how do we stop the existing corporate overlords (i.e. fossil fuel companies and their government cronies, i.e. i.e. Joe “I sold Santa his lumps of coal” Manchin (D-Hell)) from lobbying nuclear fusion developments into the fiery, non-fusion-powered pits of Tartarus? These are all roadblocks standing in the way of genuine nuclear fusion that can power our country, our world, our future, but I’d really, really like to hope that we can overcome them. Because, like I said, if there is any singular “easy” solution to climate change, it’s this one. And I do not say that lightly.

So, nuclear fusion is one of those things that, like lab-grown meat, I’ve been keeping a loose eye on it and will continue to keep a loose eye on it, but I have more hope now than I ever have in the past. I want it to succeed so badly, but the shame is that I might be well into the second half of my life by the time that it becomes commercially available, and I’ll probably be dead if/when we ever fully transition to nuclear fusion power. Now, that’s true of a transition to green energy, too. We have the power to transition to a truly green society right now, but there isn’t the political/economic will to do it. Yet. I hope that, someday, we will reach that milestone, and it is my fervent belief that nuclear fusion might be something to push us hard in that direction. So, yeah, I’m hopeful. That news from the end of last year gave me hope. Not much, but a little bit. And sometimes in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours, that’s just enough.