I don’t know about you all, but I’ve been fascinated by the news this last week surrounding the successful nuclear fusion “ignition” that occurred at the U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. For those of you who missed the news, here’s what happened: after decades of research and more than a decade of attempts, scientists created a nuclear fusion reaction that generated more energy than was required to create it. They fired 192 laser beams at a capsule the size of a pencil eraser containing isotopes that then imploded and created helium. This reaction created enough energy to boil about two and a half gallons of water.
From the perspective of pure science, this is an incredibly cool thing. People managed to generate a contained reaction that momentarily generated a heat hotter than the inside of the sun. I mean, come on! That’s amazing! The science fiction geek in me, who has watched stories since I was a little kid— Star Trek to Spiderman— that were all based around nuclear fusion as an energy source, finds the whole thing thrilling.
There’s another part of me, though, that finds the whole hullabaloo around the news infuriating and kind of sad. To be clear, the Livermore Laboratory is a weapons testing facility. They manage our nuclear stockpile. They aren’t conducting their research in order to discover a new, clean, unlimited energy source.
What they’ve managed to pull off, however, does provide to others a “proof of concept” that someday nuclear fusion can be harnessed to provide unlimited energy— eliminating the need for fossil fuels. Ernest Moniz, who was President Obama’s Energy Secretary, heralded the NIF achievement, projecting that within a decade we would witness the technology to harness nuclear fusion for commercial power generation. Moniz, it’s worth noting, serves on the board of a multi-million dollar fusion-power developer, TAE Technologies, Inc. It behooves him to project optimism about the potential of fusion power. That’s how he courts investors.
The scientists involved in fusion research are not nearly as optimistic. They insist it could be decades before fusion power is commercially viable. Meanwhile, we’re confronting serious climate impacts today. If we wait for fusion power to save us we might end up with fusion power, but as climate activist Bill McKibben writes, “those elegant reactors will be deployed, if at all, on a badly degraded, even broken, planet.”
Instead, we could be putting the kinds of government resources we’ve dedicated to the NIF (billions of dollars and counting) to get as many people as possible converted to solar and wind power quickly. As McKibben insists, these technologies provide the perfect bridge from our current climate reality to one in which fusion power is commercially viable. By focusing on them now, we can remedy some of the harm we have inflicted on the planet before the planet is irrevocably broken:
Happily, we have a bridge technology that might get us [to fusion power]: it’s the first sun, the one that hangs in the sky above Lawrence Livermore and the rest of the planet. We know how to capture its rays on photovoltaic panels, and we know how to take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, creating breeze that we can capture in giant turbines. The advantage of this technology is that we’ve long known how to build it—I’m writing these words on a computer powered by a panel on my roof that was installed in 2001—and, indeed, that we can now do so cheaply. During the past few years, the cost of renewable energy dropped below the price of fossil fuels.
Given the current cost of renewable energy, why have efforts to advance green energy use and technology been stymid? Because solar, wind, geothermal, and other existing green energy technologies aren’t well-suited to corporate consolidation and the transfer of power across massive distances. There’s never going to be a Keystone solar pipeline. Instead, green energy is best suited to local generation and local control. This is the antithesis of corporate capitalism.
Corporations also own the news media. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that they’ve spent the week boostering for the future of fusion power, while totally ignoring the existing technologies that could help us fight climate change today. Still, it is infuriating.
The really sad part to me, though, is how easily we are drawn in by the story of fusion power technologies as a climate change cure-all. Supporters of fusion power and the news media imply that we’ll be able to convert from fossil fuels to fusion power and save the planet without any reduction in our energy consumption. Nothing about our current lives will change. Nothing different will ever be required of us.
Existing science proves we are irrevocably harming our planet through our current levels of resource consumption. Technology exists that will allow us to turn away from this ongoing harm and develop a more sustainable relationship with our environment. Yet, rather than confront these uncomfortable truths and change we’d prefer to accept the story that an as-yet nonexistent technology might someday allow us to continue to consume more than we need forever.
It’s not just a symptom of late-stage capitalism. Humans have always had a tendency to look for silver bullets to solve their problems. Chronically unhealthy? Take this pill and everything will be fine! Debilitatingly lonely? Find your Soulmate and never be lonely again! Find the world overwhelming and scary? Elect this authoritarian strongman and he’ll fix everything! We’ve made these kinds of false choices forever.
None of these things will magically fix everything. No single thing (or person) will ever solve all our problems or make our lives easy and perfect. Yet we continue to chase the magic, simple solution in endless different iterations over and over again.
Resisting the allure of simple solutions means submitting to limits, and not leaving out the inconvenient pieces that complicate the narrative. For instance, it may be true that the amount of energy those 192 NIF laser beams applied to those isotopes (2.05 megajoules) resulted in the creation of more energy (3.15 megajoules). But it is also true that those 192 laser beams consumed 322 megajoules of energy in the process. Does that negate the significance of the experiment? No. But it complicates the story of what the experiment means, and we can’t ignore that part.
Where else have you experienced serious discrepancies between true input and actual output? Have you been in relationships that you realized cost you much more than you ever received? Maybe it was a job that you finally realized took way more out of you than you were being compensated? How did you extricate yourself from that situation? How did it feel to confront that reality?
There’s an integrity lesson in all of this, about the comfortable lies we tell ourselves in order to avoid uncomfortable truths. In contrast, developing a willingness to be uncomfortable might be some of the most important integrity work we ever do.
Also, science is incredibly cool. But maybe we should only listen to scientists if we want to understand what it means.
That’s it for today, folks! I’ll be back at the end of the month for a year-end wrap-up. I hope you’ll stick around for that. And if you’re not sure how you ended up here, I hope you’ll subscribe so you don’t miss it.
XO,
Asha