By Josh Gelernter
Friday, December 18, 2015
Last week, powerful men from all over the world finished
negotiating a new climate deal — the “Paris Agreement.” France’s foreign
minister, the host of the “COP21” climate conference, called the plan an
“historic turning point” in the battle against global warming. Our
representative, John Kerry, called it “a victory for the planet.”
The deal sets various goals for 2023, and for 2050
through 2100. It is absurd to think that the world’s foreign ministers can
intelligently discuss what the world’s climate, industry, transportation, or
energy markets will look like in 2023 — much less 2050 or 2100.
Consider that 2023 is eight years from now. Eight years
ago, did anyone at COP21 know Uber was coming? Did any of those foreign
ministers know how popular drones would become? That new supersonic passenger
planes would be in development? That four different private companies would be
launching space flights? That two companies would be going forward with tests
of “hyper-loop” transportation? Did they know that zero-friction “quantum
levitation” would be demonstrated? Or that hydrogen-powered cars would become
commercially available? Did they know about the fracking boom?
Of course not. Michael Crichton — the brilliant novelist
and thinker — posed this question in a speech at Caltech in 2003, re climate
predictions for 2100. What environmental problems would men in 1900 have predicted
for 2000? Where to get enough horses, and what to do with all the manure.
“Horse pollution was bad in 1900,” said Crichton. How much worse would someone
in 1900 expect it to “be a century later, with so many more people riding
horses?
“But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses
except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80 percent of its power from
an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and
Japan were getting more than 30 percent from this source, unknown in 1900.
Remember, people in 1900 didn’t know what an atom was. They didn’t know its
structure. They also didn’t know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie,
or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a
rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP,
HTML, Internet, interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control,
speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking,
bipolar, Prozac, leotards, lap dancing, e-mail, tape recorders, CDs, airbags,
plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction,
superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step,
ultrasound, nylon, rayon, Teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery,
laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS. None of this would
have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn’t know what you
are talking about.
Now: you tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell
me it’s even worth thinking about. Our [emissions] models just carry the
present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives it a
moment’s thought knows it.
“I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now
living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new
technology. . . . In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, ‘The battle to feed humanity is
over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of
people are going to starve to death.’ Ten years later, he predicted 4 billion
people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass
starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn’t ever
going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers
predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world
population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number
will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.”
In 1900, the John Kerrys of the world might have been
talking about global horse-manure accords, but a few bright-eyed
non-bureaucrats had an idea of the direction transport was moving: Thirty years
earlier, an Austrian Jew named Siegfried Marcus had built a wooden cart that
propelled itself with an internal-combustion engine: the very first car. (A
directive from the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda in 1940 instructed German
encyclopedias to amend their entries on the motorcar so that “not Siegfried
Marcus, but the two German engineers Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz will in
future be regarded as the creators of the automobile.” The lie stuck. But I
digress.)
The car didn’t catch on until sometime after Marcus’s
death in 1898. But the Marcuses of the world are still at work, and this week
we got a good look at the direction the energy market is moving: toward fusion.
Right now, the bulk of our energy comes from fossil fuel,
because it’s relatively easy to get, and to get energy out of. A gram of
gasoline holds about twice as much energy as a gram of coal. A gram of uranium
holds a little more than 1,652,173 times more energy than a gram of gasoline.
Which is why nuclear power plants are so efficient. Unfortunately, uranium is very
hard to come by, and very hard to squeeze energy out of.
But uranium, and plutonium, are used to produce power
through nuclear fission. There is an
alternative: nuclear fusion. Fission
power comes from the energy released by splitting the atoms of (certain) heavy
elements. Fusion power comes from the energy released by the fusing of two
atoms of (certain) light elements — conventionally, two isotopes of hydrogen:
deuterium and tritium.
A normal hydrogen atom has no neutrons; a deuterium atom
has one, and a tritium atom, two. When
you smash deuterium and tritium atoms together, you get helium-4 atoms, each
with two protons and two neutrons. During the fusion collision, the mass of the
fifth neutron is converted to energy — equal to its mass times the speed of
light squared: E = MC2. (How about that?)
Even though deuterium is rare and tritium even rarer
(tritium has to be manufactured, by using deuterium, or one of a few other
elements), we won’t run out of them. One estimate says that, at current global
energy use, we have enough naturally occurring fusionable deuterium in our
seawater to last us 150 billion years (or: for 145 billion years after our sun
dies).
Fusion reactors will create enormous amounts of energy
and produce no radioactive waste and no pollution. There’s only one problem: So
far, they don’t work.
Fusion reactors have produced energy, but, till recently,
they all produced less energy than the immense quantity required to run them.
But for the first time, in 2013, the Lawrence Livermore Lab in California
created a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it cost. Just this
week, a gigantic new fusion reactor was completed in Germany; it will go online
next year, and hopes for net energy production are high. Meanwhile, a gigantic
new reactor is being built in southern France (with our money, and money from
the EU, the PRC, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea). It’s called ITER, and
it’s designed to be the basis for the first commercial fusion power plants.
It’s planned to produce 500 megawatts while taking just 50 megawatts to run.
It’s expected to come online in the 2020s.
Of course, ITER might not work. The German reactor might
not work either. But the advance of science is inevitable — fusion reactors
will work, one day, and I’d bet sooner rather than later. (I’d like to see an
American president stand up and say: This nation should commit itself to
achieving the goal, before the next decade is out, of sustaining a fusion
reaction and getting energy out of it.) When fusion power comes online, energy
will become dirt cheap. No more energy will be generated using coal, or
petroleum, or wind power. Every car will be powered by unbelievably cheap
electricity. There will be no more fossil-fuel pollution, except by collectors’
classic cars.
Exhaust fumes will be the horse droppings of the future.
John Kerry will continue to look silly.
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