A Fusion Breakthrough That Could Change the World

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, December 12, 2022

 

When you see the word “fusion” in National Review, it’s probably in the context of fusionism — the effort to get libertarians and traditionalist conservatives to work together to advance the cause of ordered liberty — or in the context of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the Russiagate accusations.

 

But maybe, just maybe, the U.S. Department of Energy has discovered real fusion, the kind of breakthrough that changes the world.

 

Across the bay from San Francisco, the Lawrence Livermore National Labs have been conducting fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility, a giant lab the size of a sports stadium, where the equipment “precisely guides, amplifies, reflects, and focuses 192 powerful laser beams into a target about the size of a pencil eraser in a few billionths of a second, delivering more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy and 500 trillion watts of peak power.” If you smash two atoms together at exceptionally high speeds, they merge, and in the process release energy; for decades, researchers have been stymied by the challenge of generating a reaction that releases more energy than it consumes. That, reportedly, is what the Department of Energy has done for the first time.

 

The Financial Times had the scoop and reported that, “The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers.”

 

The Washington Post notes the caveats:

 

Creating the net energy gain required engagement of one of the largest lasers in the world, and the resources needed to recreate the reaction on the scale required to make fusion practical for energy production are immense. More importantly, engineers have yet to develop machinery capable of affordably turning that reaction into electricity that can be practically deployed to the power grid.

 

Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale, scientists say, would require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce. At the same time, the reaction creates neutrons that put a tremendous amount of stress on the equipment creating it, such that it can get destroyed in the process.

 

There’s a long way to go, and this is just the first step, but it is a key first step. The potential of this breakthrough is spectacular. A few months ago, Andrew Follett wrote at National Review that the development of fusion-energy production would effectively end the arguments about how the U.S. and the world can develop sufficient energy without producing carbon emissions that would exacerbate climate change.

 

“Fusion would be a game changer, as it lacks the public-relations problems that environmentalists have attached to conventional nuclear reactors: The process would generate essentially no hazardous waste and wouldn’t even require hazardous fuel,” Follett wrote. “Operational fusion power would probably be so efficient that it would permanently put most other forms of generating electricity out of business, as it would likely be ‘too cheap to meter.’”

 

I read a sentence like that and wonder A) how many people would like to sabotage the development of cold-fusion energy production because it would put their whole industry out of business and B) how many countries would like to ensure that they have an edge in turning this experimental breakthrough into widespread reality ahead of the United States. Or maybe I just saw too many Keanu Reeves thrillers back in the 1990s.

 

Back in August 2021, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin laid out the far-reaching civilizational effects of achieving fusion energy:

 

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.

 

The Department of Energy is scheduled to hold an announcement tomorrow.

 

A Big Win for Putin at a Bad Time for the West

 

One of the Morning Jolt’s globetrotting readers writes in a few insightful thoughts about the Brittney Griner–Viktor Bout trade:

 

In criminal gangs, the ability to apply pressure on politicians to release people from prison is the ultimate demonstration of power.

 

At the moment that President Biden chose to release Viktor Bout, there were a lot of Russians thinking hard about whether the better career path lay in maximizing the horror they inflict and earning credit with Putin or in minimizing it, potentially defecting. With the release of Bout, Putin was able to engineer a powerful demonstration that if you stick with him, he will protect you even if you mess up and get caught by the Americans.

 

The return of Griner in this light seems something like a close parallel of the trolley problem; throw the switch and an American goes free, but any number of Ukrainians suffer unimaginable and often deadly fates.

 

The outcome of the Russia–Ukraine war will be shaped by much larger factors than the perceptions of this prisoner swap in Russia and elsewhere. But sometimes this fight feels like a matchup between one man determined to win a war and another man determined to win a news cycle.

 

In last week’s busy news cycle, it was easy to overlook this surprising declaration of U.S. policy:

 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The Wall Street Journal last Monday that the U.S. would support Kyiv in recovering territory Russia has grabbed since launching its large-scale invasion on Feb. 24, suggesting that Washington might not back Ukraine militarily in retaking areas that Russia seized in 2014, including the Crimean Peninsula.

 

That is a very quiet declaration that the U.S. does not want to contest the Russian annexation of Crimea that occurred in 2014.

 

That’s just one more reason why Biden’s October 2019 boast, “Putin knows that when I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny, and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe, are over” is even more infuriating from the perspective of today.