Monday open thread: The future may be about to arrive
Good morning, Barflies! I bring you some earth shattering science news.
Today, we can expect Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and Under Secretary for nuclear security Jill Hruby to announce a "major scientific breakthrough." What is it, you ask? This.
US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.
Producing more energy from a fusion reaction than was put in has been the holy grail of fusion science since the 1950s. How much energy was extracted? Well:
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 people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed....Two of the people with knowledge of the results said the energy output had been greater than expected, which had damaged some diagnostic equipment, complicating the analysis. The breakthrough was already being widely discussed by scientists, the people added.
“If this is confirmed, we are witnessing a moment of history,” said Dr Arthur Turrell, a plasma physicist whose book The Star Builders charts the effort to achieve fusion power. “Scientists have struggled to show that fusion can release more energy than is put in since the 1950s, and the researchers at Lawrence Livermore seem to have finally and absolutely smashed this decades-old goal.”
I last addressed our progress toward achieving fusion energy here. I first broached the subject here. At that time, I said this:
Cracking the fusion riddle will lead to a wholesale reordering of not just energy, but global geopolitics. So much of our foreign relations entail the need to secure energy resources. Compact nuclear fusion plants would eradicate the genesis of many of the world's conflicts. With those causes removed, we might be able to solve seemingly intractable tensions. And, of course, abundant, cheap energy will spur an economic boom the likes of which humanity has never seen. If you pray or send thoughts into the Universe, you should include the successful quest for fusion in your daily novenas.
Extracting more energy from a reaction than was put in to produce it is not "game over", but it's pretty damned close. And again, I cannot overstate the ramifications of developing this technology. It will bring a change to human civilization which, really, hasn't been seen since the Agricultural Revolution of the Neolithic. Growing crops and settling down in villages changed home sapiens. Having abundant and limitless energy will be equally species-changing. We really can't grasp just how wide-ranging the changes to our civilization will be, just like hunter-gatherers couldn't not have foreseen what growing crops would do to their way of life.
In a world which seems to grow more chaotic, there are bright rays of hope. This is possibly the biggest, brightest one. And I for one am agog with wonder.