Hump day open thread: It's all about energy
The sardonic joke about nuclear fusion is that it's "just thirty years away"; of course, they've been saying this for sixty years. If humanity can crack the riddle of nuclear fusion, it would be the greatest revolution in human history. Greater than the agrarian revolution which saw human beings transition from hunter-gatherers to builders of cities and empires. Greater than the industrial revolution. Greater than the silicon revolution. For the first time in its history, human beings wouldn't have to worry from whence they derived their energy. It would be cheap, clean, and infinite. But, again, it seems to be always thirty years away, with the road to nirvana seemingly endless.
Well, that might be changing:
Scientists in Britain announced Wednesday they had smashed a previous record for generating fusion energy, hailing it as a "milestone" on the path towards cheap, clean power and a cooler planet.
Nuclear fusion is the same process that the sun uses to generate heat. Proponents believe it could one day help address climate change by providing an abundant, safe and green source of energy.
A team at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility near Oxford in central England generated 59 megajoules of energy for five seconds during an experiment in December, more than doubling a 1997 record, the UK Atomic Energy Authority said.
That is about the power needed to power 35,000 homes for the same period of time, five seconds, said JET's head of operations Joe Milnes.
The results "are the clearest demonstration worldwide of the potential for fusion energy to deliver safe and sustainable low-carbon energy", the UKAEA said.
Now, before we get too excited, this still wasn't the reaction we need. The holy grail is to get more energy out of a reaction than you put in. According to the article, the researchers used three times more energy to trigger the reaction than was generated. But every step along the way is crucial, and this is another milestone on which they can base further experiments.
A western Japan venture plans to build the first experimental plant in the country to generate power through nuclear fusion, the company said, as the technology is drawing attention as a new way of producing energy without emitting carbon dioxide.
Kyoto Fusioneering Ltd., a startup based in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, is aiming to start operation of the plant in the next five years, having already procured some of the funds and started designing the plant, CEO Taka Nagao told Kyodo News in a recent interview.
The experimental plant will be equipped with a heat exchanger and turbine in addition to a reactor that generates thermal energy to produce a small amount of electricity, with the generation capacity expected to be several dozen kilowatts, the company said.
Though experimental reactors to prove the feasibility of nuclear fusion reaction exist in Japan and abroad, "a plant that actually generates power is rare even on a global basis," Nagao said.
Again, this is a small but important step towards achieving the dream of limitless energy. The struggle to secure energy resources such as oil and gas fuels many of our armed conflicts. A world in which all nations would be energy self-sufficient would be a world in which the prime fuse for war would be snuffed out.
But we can imagine even more than that. Perfecting fusion energy would be a civilizational moment. It would go far to mitigate the effects of climate change. It would open new industries and technologies. It would change our economies down to the fundamentals. And it would open the Solar System to human exploration and habitation. The knock-on effects of fusion, much like the energy itself, could be limitless.
We hairless apes can be violent and destructive. Our history is full of countless tragedies. And at the same time, we can create wonders which in past days would have been seen as the purview of the gods. Humanity is on the verge of leaving behind its long adolescence. That by itself is reason enough for hope.