The Line's Nice List: The clean, safe sci-fi power source of our Star Trek future
We at The Line are, we admit, often a bit on the grumpy side. But there are wonderful, happy stories worth celebrating, and in the final week before Christmas, we’re going to make a point of lauding some of what’s good in the world right now. That’s right: this is our nice list.
Today: Matt Gurney on why he’s holding out for some super-cool impulse power.
By: Matt Gurney
When a colleague first suggested that The Line lean a little bit off brand and spend the week before Christmas focusing on only good stories — not our usual stock-in-trade here, you've probably noticed — I had two immediate instincts.
The first was that we'd need to also do a week of bad-news stories to stay true to ourselves, and the second was that maybe my good-news story should be "Hey, at least no one got nuked this year." There were a few weeks there where I did not take that for granted.
But once the idea of a week of good-news stories was into my head, I found myself returning to it over and over. It really shouldn't be that hard to come up with something. While I am very worried and pessimistic about a lot of our long-term trends and challenges on the societal level, I am a fairly cheerful and contented person as an individual. My dark sense of humour doesn't alter the fact of my overall satisfaction with life, and there is lots to be satisfied with and grateful for. Especially science.
Oh God, you're thinking. Another COVID-era lauding of the scientists. Don't worry, this isn't that, though I remain profoundly grateful for the work of the men and women who rapidly brought us safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, and encouraged by the thought that a useful RSV vaccine may soon be upon us. RSV, bane of hospitals across Canada this year, is no walk in the park at the best of times. If we can neuter that little bugger, too, so much the better.
But it's not vaccines and mRNA that has me most excited as this year ends and Christmas approaches. No, that bit of excitement is thanks to something else: holy frickin' fusion power!
You couldn't really escape the news just a few days ago that American scientists had finally achieved the long-sought milestone of "net gain." I won't belabour the scientific recaps; the truth is, most of the true science is beyond my grasp. But the short version is this: getting two atoms to fuse into a lighter atom, thus releasing a huge amount of (clean!) energy, isn't the problem. The problem to date has been that the process of fusing those atoms was itself so energy intensive that it cost more energy to achieve than the reaction produced.
That is what has now been overcome. The American scientists fired hundreds of high-energy lasers at a tiny little pod of fusion fuel, and the lasers triggered a fusion reaction that released more energy than the lasers themselves zapped into the pod. This is a long, long way from a viable energy system, but it's a scientific milestone that we've been working on for literally generations.
And honestly, it's one I really didn't think we'd see until next decade. I also thought the Europeans would figure it out first, with their "tokamak" reactors — there's two ways to attempt fusion, and the Americans have been pursuing one (laser bombardment) and the Europeans another (crushing the fuel with hyper-powerful magnetic fields). The European model really did seem to me to be the better bet. Shows how much I know.
Failed predictions aside, I follow this area of technology as closely as my limited grasp of the science allows, and for a very simple reason. If we can make fusion work at an economically viable scale, it's the holy grail. A fusion reactor would be safe — the reaction is so complex that any major failure in the system would just instantly terminate the reaction. It’s a truly fail-safe system, very much unlike a nuclear fission reaction, which can sustain itself long enough to go full Chernobyl on you if something breaks. Fusion produces vastly fewer radioactive contaminants as waste byproduct — as close to zero as we'll likely ever see. And the Earth's oceans contain enough deuterium fuel to meet current energy demands for billions of years.
In the days before the big announcement, but after the Financial Times had basically reported what it would be, a friend of mine asked me about "the catch" for fusion. It's clean. It's safe. The fuel is effectively limitless. So what's the bad news? There really isn't any, in the sense he meant. Fusion would be a massive game-changer because it’s almost all upside. The catch has been that we couldn't figure out how to do it, despite working on it for decades, to the point where it’s become a kind of joke to muse that fusion power is always a few decades away, and always would be. If we solve these challenges, though, we're literally into the realm of science fiction. Fusion reactors are what power the impulse engines of Star Trek lore — not quite powerful for faster-than-light travel (you need anti-matter to power your warp drives) but fusion is what powers the impulse engines that would allow us to travel anywhere, at speed, in our own solar system. The possibilities are endless.
Right now, these are still just possibilities. What the Americans did at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a successful science experiment, not a practical workable commercial reactor design. There remain significant engineering obstacles between a net-gain experiment and the first megawatts of clean fusion power hitting an electrical transmission grid near you. On top of those engineering challenges, we'd also need to develop a whole new fusion fuel supply chain to deliver deuterium (and probably tritium, too, in the earlier reactors). We're having a hard enough time getting our existing supply chains figured out. A civilization that can't make and distribute enough Playstation 5 video game consoles and root beer (not that I'm bitter) is maybe not quite ready to roll out massive quantities of the miracle nuclear fuel of our spacefaring future. So first we’ll need the fuel, and at a cost that’s competitive with other options — even after we figure out the engineering, if fusion costs a trillion times more per kilowatt hour than coal, we’re still screwed.
So yeah, it’s true. Getting from net-gain to the true promise of this new technology is going to be an enormous process. That's always the case, though, with every new technology. Once we figure out the science, we get to work on the engineering. And as I'm fond of reminding people, engineers are smart. I really do believe that there isn't anything that's scientifically possible that engineers can't figure out a way to do, eventually.
So yes. We still have an “eventually” to contend with here, but everything is an eventually until it happens.
And if fusion happens, we're not just looking at the breakthrough that stopping climate change in its tracks would require, or that would rip the financial rug out from underneath some of the most oppressive regimes in the world, propped up only by their petrodollars (the reason Canadians rightly boast of their ethical oil is because many other oil-exporting regimes are, to put it mildly, decidedly unethical). With fusion, we're looking at a technology that could truly open up the solar system to long-term exploration and eventually settlement. And after the last few years we've had here on Planet Earth, the idea of "backing up the hard drive" of human civilization by getting off our one little rock certainly has some appeal, doesn't it?
We aren't there yet, but getting fusion figured out will take us a big step in that direction. We've many steps to go. But we're moving the right way. That's something to be profoundly grateful for. And I can't wait to see what comes next.
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