News out of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory yesterday could mean nothing less than changing the entire course of human civilization, not to mention our climate and ultimately our planet.
Creating energy from nuclear fusion1 has long been a dream. It is carbon-free, waste-free, safe, clean, and limitless. And until this week, we haven’t quite been able to make it work.
But yesterday in California, scientists announced that for the first time they have been able to produce more energy than it took to drive the fusion process. To put it bluntly, this is huge. (And for more emerging news and analysis on this, CNN has more.)
Taking widespread use of fusion-based energy from the realm of the plausible, to the probable…..changes everything. Will we have fusion-powered homes anytime soon? No. There is a long way to go and it will likely take at least a couple more decades before commercial and public uses can come online, and certainly more time than that for widespread adoption, but it is now virtually certain that even more public and private money will pour in to help accelerate us along that path.
We have been getting closer in recent years, with UK scientists achieving a brief (5 second) burst of fusion energy about a year ago, but this breakthrough in California produced a meaningful gain in energy for the very first time.
It’s pretty crazy to think that within my lifetime, we may indeed have fusion-based electricity as a significant portion of our global source of power. Truly amazing.
Perhaps this is too naive of me, I don’t know. But I think we may look back on December 2022 as the moment where human evolution and development began a whole new era.
Fission - the way we produce nuclear energy right now - involves splitting atoms and creates radioactive waste. Fusion involves fusing atoms - the same process that creates energy in the sun. Its main input is hydrogen - the most abundant element in the universe, and easily extracted from water for the purposes of fusion on Earth. It produces no hazardous waste.
I take hope from your enthusiasm....Sometimes it feels like we take one step forward, one step back...but with the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act yesterday AND this news, it feels like progress might be happening on many levels after all. Here’s to hope - and tiny, world changing, breakthroughs in what’s possible, for all of us.