The Power of Science
Terry H. Schwadron
Dec. 14, 2022
Science is delivering what appears to be an important breakthrough in energy for the planet — an announcement that a U.S. Energy Department laboratory at Lawrence Livermore has finally cracked the code of nuclear fusion.
The question is not its significance, but whether the early findings of a government laboratory can be turned effectively into a production system worthy of its possibilities.
If it works on a sustainable level, this can displace our reliance on oil and fossil fuels in a foreseeable future.
So, it is an amazing scientific marker with the ability to scale to proportions that could entirely change the debate over climate politics
As an achievement for government, the possibilities for sweeping changes in economics and daily life are almost too much to consider in a single moment.
Naturally, the first question is whether it all works as discussed. Past efforts have fallen apart over fraudulent test results in the ever-present scientist race for discovery or in nationalistic claims that prove to be less than sustainable, and thus, impractical.
But the world of politics and policymaking can’t be more than a nuclear collision away, as there will be questions about ownership, about investments for fusion development, about what happens to a global economy seeming fixated on oil futures, and about the practical matters of translating scientific breakthroughs into daily life.
Specifically, yesterday’s announcement centered on reaching “ignition” by 192 lasers blasting a small amount of hydrogen encased in a diamond to produce more energy than had been expended in targeting the blast and producing a heavier form of hydrogen. It had been a goal of the National Ignition Facility at the lab since experiments began in 2009.
The significant conclusion: Getting from this point to recognizable goals obviously is difficult, but now no longer impossible.
What is Nuclear Fusion
For us lay people, nuclear fusion happens when two or more atoms are fused into one larger one, a process that generates a massive amount of energy as heat. If sustainable, that heat is key to helping produce energy that can displace the reliance on fossil fuels.
To date, scientists have used a huge donut-shaped machine called a tokamak outfitted with giant magnets to generate fusion that lasted up to about five seconds in a British experiment earlier this year. The effort to improve that record has drawn scientists from around the world.
The process of fusion creates helium and neutrons which are lighter in mass than the parts from which they were made. The missing mass is converted into energy as neutrons escape to strike the lining of the tokamak walls and reading as heat. This heat can then be used to warm water, create steam and power turbines to generate power.
Heat here is really hot. Machines generating the reaction hold a plasma that must reach at least 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. Clearly the challenge is producing that heat over a sustained period to power electric grids and heating systems around the globe.
The Vision
As with other matters to which we turn to Science including covid and cancer, moonshots, materials sciences that give us cellphones and lithium batteries, it is as much the reception we prepare for Science as the technical information itself that matters.
The boldness of this announcement by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm should underscore a certain awe for what Science and knowledge can bring us. That seems especially true in our anti-intellectual, anti-elite culture of the moment, in which only personal experience is supposed to suffice for actual factual exploration of all things medical or technological.
It is hard to square a MAGA view of the world — isolationist, anti-informationist and propagandistic — with the raw pursuit of Science and other intellectual pursuits. It is too easy to believe that even this truly inspiring announcement about the interactions of colliding atoms can achieve won’t be denied or digested and regurgitated as an attack on Big Oil by radical Democrats.
Elon Musk, who apparently just speaks first, then thinks, is calling for prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci over covid policies rather than thanking him for his best efforts to come up with strategies for a pandemic that was bringing the world to its knees. What is he even talking about — and perhaps more importantly, why is anyone listening?
Sometimes Science is just that — a process of discovery.
This feels like one of those times. And if the discovery is a good one that turns heads and opens loads of new possibilities, we ought to bow the head for a moment for those who cut their way through the technological jungles without dripping divisive politics all over the results.
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