Breakthrough
In the early afternoon of August 4, 2050 a remarkable scientific breakthrough took place in a laboratory in the small town of Livermore, California. The Lawrence Livermore National Lab had been working on nuclear fusion since 2008, using lasers to try to get atoms of tritium and deuterium to fuse and release energy. A "break even point" had been reached in December 2022, when the amount of energy released from the reaction had equalled the amount input to the lasers to achieve the result.
Since that time progress had been slow and incremental. As an clean energy source without radioactive waste, the National Ignition Facility had been unable to compete in cost with natural green power plants like solar energy and wind turbines. But everything changed on that eventful day in August 2050, when a routine increase in laser power switched on an unexpected resonance in the nuclear reaction, and more `fuel' `burned' in a fraction of a second than had previously been consumed in minutes.
LLNL, as it is referred to, is a large government laboratory, one of a handful run by the Department of Energy and supporting universities. But a buzz went around the whole lab in no longer than it takes for light to arrive from the sun. Was this experiment repeatable? In a short time it was shown to be so. The lead scientists gathered round a laptop to find the words and pictures to get this into the scientific literature as fast as they reasonably could.
A week later it was time for a press conference to let the world know of the discovery. The Director of Lawrence Livermore and the Secretary of the Department of Energy, Althea Wilkins, were the lead speakers and representatives of the laser fusion team shed their lab coats for suits to speak at the occasion. TV networks and reporters from San Francisco filled the conference room to cover the story.
By chance Elaine Waters had turned on the TV to take her mind off troubles she was having finding the right colouring for a portrait she was working on. An artist, aged 63, and living in Baltimore, she had been concentrating on portraiture since her husband had retired from academia a few years ago. "Abundant clean energy," the DoE Secretary exclaimed. That got her attention. She turned up the volume so that she could relay the news to her husband, a social scientist, when he returned from golf later that afternoon.
A news notification on his iPhone prompted Fred Jarret to look further at this story. A lecturer in history at the University of Cape Town, aged 45, he had always had an interest in science, rarely missing the regular science show on SABC. Fred recognised that work on terrestrial nuclear fusion had had a long development history. Success had always been 30 years away. He wondered how large the infrastructure had become to make the nuclei fuse. It was hard to tell from the article in the Cape Times that his iPhone directed him to. But it was a good question, could this be replicated in every country in the world, in Southern Africa? If so, the implications for society would be massive. All those living in informal settlements throughout South Africa might have access to cheap power.
Andrew Lynch saw the news on the front page of the Melbourne Age newspaper. It is unusual for a science story to make the front page the The Age, but this was an unusual story. Andrew, 35, is a baker and a franchisee of the Bakers Delight organisation. Rising power bills in 2023 made a new power generation technology an attractive idea to him. He mentioned the discovery to his front counter staff casually. How long would it take this technology to reach the newly formed State Electricity Commission ?
Joan Batten heard the news at morning coffee with her colleagues at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Parkville, Melbourne. A microbiologist 55 years of age she followed all stories about climate change and extinction of species avidly. Although she felt activism was something for the younger generation, she felt deeply about these issues. Here was a good news story about the energy dilemma, and she spent the morning feeling better about the future of the planet.
Joan has been researching the effects of a new drug WEHI is studying on human digestive enzymes. It is routine work for her, but well motivated. She does spend time thinking about the non-routine. Her dream is to find a cure for a rare disease. If physicists can make breakthroughs, so can she!
Andrew turned his attention to the batch of white dinner rolls he was about to put in the oven. He was given to reverie while performing these routine tasks. He knew nuclear fusion powered the sun. In future would he be using similar energy to earn his living ? As he closed the over door, his attention returned to the rest of his day. As a baker, he rose early to get the day's fresh bread into the oven. This afternoon he would have free, to watch his favourite AFL team, the Bulldogs play Sydney. He dreamed of their winning the premiership this year, or maybe next.....
Fred Jarret returned his thoughts to the historical novel he was writing. It was set during the reign of the English king, Henry VIII. These were exciting times, as renaissance thought impacted medieval English society. The narrator in his novel was a jousting partner of the ebullient and unpredictable king, who had not left so much in writing that his character was well known to historians. Through his skill of more than one kind, this fellow had kept his head. Fred got his ideas for the novel, more or less dreaming that he was alive at the time and was in fact the narrator. He wrote at the rough rate of one chapter per week and he worked on it around his lecture schedule.
Elaine’s newly positive mood stimulates thoughts about the river cruise in Europe she has always dreamed of taking. She spends her lunch hour googling what is on offer from the travel brokers while tucking into her sandwiches. She notes down a Viking cruise on the Rhine from Amsterdam to Bucharest as a possibility for next summer. Are river cruises threatened by climate change ? The Rhine is probably not a case in point in the near future. Anyway, a blow against climate change has been struck this week by the breakthrough in nuclear fusion.
Althea Wilkins felt that the press conference has gone extremely well, perhaps the best of a dozen she had given in her 3 years as Energy Secretary. The subject, nuclear fusion, more or less explained itself, and the questions from the Bay Area reporters allowed her to show her excitement about the discovery and its import for any audience. She shared her flight back to Washington with DoE’s Chief Scientist. What might the next steps be? They agreed it was essential to disseminate the discovery to those of their labs that were close to high power lasers and to nuclear energy. Sandia Lab in Alberquerque came quickly to mind, but also potential industry partners such as GE, Westinghouse, Hitachi and TerraPower. Some of these companies would soon be beating a path to DoE’s door with plans to develop and implement the technology and steal a march on the commercial competition.
A week later in the early evening Elaine received a phone call from her son, Matthew. Since his graduation from Caltech he had worked for Northrup Grumman in Los Angeles. The company was a diversified aerospace corporation with large weapons contracts, ranging from bombers to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Their early work on directed energy weapons had made it possible to destroy aerial targets with radar power, starting with drones, but now reaching missiles. That was the area that Matthew had been working on. Matthew effused about the project he had just been transferred to, civilian nuclear fusion, a relief to be doing something 100% constructive for a change. Elaine recalled the press conference that she happened to have caught on TV. “Abundant clean energy” she parroted the reporter. Matthew was surprised she was so well informed. Elaine was proud of her son and pleased that she had shown herself aware of the news he described, for once.
Andrew Lynch had spent the week baking in the mornings and alternating between the gym and the pool in the afternoons. He was a little self satisfied with his fitness, given the effort he was putting into it. He didn’t usually watch the ABC’s longest running program, the documentary Four Corners. But he caught a promo that recalled what he had read in The Age. The doco was about ANSTO’s interest in nuclear fusion. ANSTO was Australia’s nuclear agency. In the late 2020s it has almost folded after successive governmental maralinga-phobic budget cuts. But then it had been saved by AUKUS, the submarine purchase. In the absence of any local industry interest in nuclear engineering, ANSTO had stepped into the vacuum, partnering with DST Group to manage nuclear safety, refuelling protocols and training the trainers. The new revived ANSTO felt confident that it could now move into the field of energy from nuclear fusion and was willing to tell the Four Corners team how they had grown from a small reactor south of Sydney to a major player in defence, and soon to be the torchbearer for nuclear fusion. Australia’s clean energy transition in the 2030s had been slower than expected, when transmission of power from desert Australia to the cities had hindered a number of mega-projects. Fusion reactors could be placed close to the cities where the power was needed.
Joan Batten has spent the week trying to decide whether to switch research topic.
An expression of interest has recently been circulating around WEHI to form a team to research the genetic predisposition to glaucoma, the disease of the optic nerve. Her mother had developed this condition in her sixties and Joan felt that work on glaucoma might be her last big push. The week’s news from Lawrence Livermore had given her feelings of optimism, confidence and hope. Could this be her opportunity to shine?
In South Africa Fred Jarret settled down with a glass of wine from his favourite Stellenbosch winery to read his daughter’s blog. She had been the recipient of. Fulbright Scholarship and did her PhD at MIT. From there it had been an exciting step for Sophie Jarret to recruitment at SpaceX. In the 2030s SpaceX had gone from strength to strength. No longer just serving other Agencies’ need for launches, SpaceX had been first to land a crew on Mars. Successive crews had developed a cavern to shield the humans from the rigours of the Martian surface. They had solved the return flight problem with their reusable rockets.
Had SpaceX fulfilled the founder’s vision? Not really. The expressed goal was to colonise the planet and for humans to be a multi-planet species. Somehow, SpaceX had stalled along the way. Terraforming a city sized area of the planet was simply beyond the reach of the self contained missions SpaceX could muster with the limited energy a spacecraft could import. Solar panels couldn’t achieve the energy density to produce enough water that not just a crew required, but that a city needed.
Sophie was the one who, after the Livermore announcement, had approached the boss with the idea of introducing nuclear fusion to Mars. Here was an energy supply that might be equal to the task. She was told to quickly form a research group to see what it would take to make the thought a possibility. The excitement in her blog was palpable. Fred wished she was in the room, so he could communicate his reaction. More and more scientific progress was becoming a side line to his interest in medieval history. He had started writing articles on science topics of particular interest for The Conversation, which welcomed international contributions. It was a little early to break this SpaceX story, but it would certainly be a winner when he did.
Elaine, Joan, Fred and Andrew. Their lives had all been touched by the event at Livermore. All our lives are altered by scientific progress. Indeed, science is one of the big influencers as civilisation moves forward. What a breakthrough!