Energy

THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com. Thomas McArdle

Fusion’s Enemies

The fusion breakthrough means no apocalypse for our grandchildren

ON dec. 5, scieNtists atthe Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California aimed 192 laser beams at a pinhead-sized target containing deuterium and tritium, and a fusion reaction succeeded in releasing more energy than the amount delivered by the lasers. But this achievement of inertial confinement fusion is not only the first time in history that nuclear fusion has worked under controlled conditions (in contrast to a thermonuclear bomb); those lasers also disintegrated the green energy fanatics’ arguments in favor of dismantling the world’s more than 90 percent fossil fuel-based $85 trillion economy.

Nuclear fusion is the means of energy generation conducted within the sun, and for mankind’s needs, it’s a source of energy that’s, for all practical purposes, infinite. Unlike the nuclear fission utilized in today’s nuclear power plants, fusion wouldn’t generate unstable nuclei that remain radioactive for millions of years and must thus be transported for permanent disposal to nuclear waste sites. Nor would fusion entail the risk of accidents releasing fatal amounts of radioactivity to populated areas (the danger of which the nuclear power industry has minimized in recent decades); nor could a fusion apparatus be used to construct nuclear weapons.

Now that we know inertial confinement fusion works in a controlled laboratory setting, the challenges in bringing about its widespread industrial use, which pertain to energy delivery to the target, the availability of tritium or the development of the use of an alternative such as boron or helium-3, symmetry control, heating and density of the fuel, hydrodynamic stability, and shockwave convergence, can all be expected to be solved within the next 40 years.

But if you think the left, both here and around the world, is going to stand for their mission to cripple capitalism being derailed by a scientific breakthrough, you don’t know them. Fusion opens the floodgates of energy; radical environmentalists, on the other hand, want energy to trickle down and be rationed in accordance with government edicts.

Instead of a world of limitless possibility in which even those who are now poor can live out their dreams, the left’s dream is a world of severe restrictions on economic prosperity and individualism; a global economy in which solar panels, windmills, and mass transit are forced on the public as a duty; and a society in which the freedom of driving your own family car is replaced by the mobility limits, enforced conformity, and artificial community—not to mention discomforts, lack of privacy, and crime—of the bus and train for all (except possibly the likes of Biden climate envoy John Kerry and other climate policemen among our governmental betters, who are wedded to private luxury travel).

In the years to come, we can expect them to insist on unreasonably heavy regulatory hurdles imposed by the government when fusion becomes industrially feasible. In other words, artificial impediments to the realization of fusion’s benefits for mankind.

However, there can be no forgetting that the environmentalist left is driven by the irrationality of pure fanaticism and that their objective is to revolutionize society into complete unrecognizability. Just in September, Jane Fonda was asked how her new climate-focused political action committee “will be able to deliver on a fully de-carbonized America.”

Instead of presenting any science, Fonda replied: “There would be no climate crisis if there was no racism. There would be no climate crisis if there was no misogyny,” saying that “we need to take a good look at” America’s free market economic system. “All of the experts, and I’m not one, say this will force us and this will be an opportunity to restructure the way humanity lives on the planet. … Between now and 2030, we could cut fossil fuels in half, but then we have to do a whole lot of other things.”

If we want nuclear fusion to come online cheaply as soon as possible and produce the definitive solution to a hotter earth, we’ll let private industry be in charge, largely unfettered, instead of dreaming up a plethora of new, excessive regulations.

And in the meantime, with total global oil shale resources 1,000 times greater than the more than 1.6 trillion barrels of crude oil reserves in the world that by themselves will last us another half century, as well as 100 years of clean natural gas that’s now reachable within the United States alone thanks to fracking, the fusion breakthrough means no apocalypse for our grandchildren to suffer after all.

So in the near term, keep solar panels and windmills secondary, and drill, baby, drill.

If we want nuclear fusion to come on line cheaply as soon as possible, we will let private industry be in charge, instead of dreaming up a plethora of new, excessive regulations.