Hello and welcome back to my civic issues blog! Today we will be continuing our discussion on the environment and energy crisis.

When it comes to our energy crisis, we desperately need a new, clean, renewable energy source to limit climate change and give the world energy for years to come. Our current energy sources are simply not doing the trick. Fossil fuels are dirty and running out, hydropower is limited to areas with running water and alter aquatic ecosystems, wind energy is limited to windy areas and looks ugly in the sky, solar energy is expensive and not efficient enough, and the list goes on.

In previous blogs, I have talked about the benefits of nuclear energy, but even that is limited in many ways. First, you need Uranium, a nonrenewable resource, to run those plants and second there is the chance that the reactor has a meltdown and a devastating event such as Chernobyl could happen again. Despite these facts, I am still a proponent of nuclear energy and think we should expand the number of nuclear power plants today because of their clean nature.

Now, this type of nuclear energy is called fission. The process of splitting atoms apart to get energy. There is a second type of harnessing nuclear energy which is called fusion. Fusion is what the sun uses to provide light and honestly is the source of all power on Earth. Fusion is “what happens when the nuclei of small atoms stick together, fusing to create a new element and releasing energy. The most common form is two hydrogen atoms fusing to create helium” according to Vox.

Should we be able to harness fusion and essentially create an artificial star, we would have an energy source that produces no greenhouse gasses, and has minimal waste compared to current energy sources. All of this sounds great, but the science and funding of this science is the difficult part.

The sun can perform fusion because of its size and the strength of its gravitational field. It can slam atoms together with ease. On Earth, we do not have that luxury. We need to adapt and find new ways to combine these atoms. Now, scientists have been able to do fusion here on Earth but doing so has required putting more energy into the system then the fusion energy produced. This is problematic when we are trying to use these energy systems to power our world.

As scientists continue to work toward energy-positive fusion reactions, they are getting closer than ever. This past August, scientists at the National Ignition Facility created 1.3 megajoules of output from 1.9 megajoules of input, the highest yield reaction to date (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). I say this to show that although this sounds like a very far-fetched scientific dream, there is progress being done in this field.

That is where the civic nature of this topic comes into play. According to Vox, currently, the US department of energy spends about $500 million on fusion each year. Compared to about $1 billion on fossil fuel energy and $2.7 billion on renewables, or $23 billion on NASA and $700 billion on the military. This is only a small amount of money going towards possibly the energy of the future.

Granted, this is only possibly the energy of the future, it is hard to give more money to a program based on promises and not necessarily by results. At this rate, fusion energy powering our world is honestly at least years and likely decades away. The research and funding we put into fusion research right now go toward seeing if energy-positive fusion reactions are even possible. As we continue to advance in this field, hopefully the money will soon go toward making these reactions efficient and ultimately into using that money to power our gird, but again these timetables are still far into the future.

On the other hand, increasing funding would likely speed up research and give humanity a potential answer to their energy and climate change crises. I am not sure what the right area to invest in, as a society, to solve our currently crises, but I would like to propose to you that investing in fusion energy might just be the right area. It kills two birds with one stone. Should we be able to do fusion, this could be humanities greatest achievement to date.

Let me know in the comments if you have heard of fusion energy before and if you think it is a possible solution to our current energy and climate change crises.

Thanks for reading!

https://www.vox.com/22801265/fusion-energy-electricity-power-climate-change-research-iter

https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-experiment-puts-researchers-threshold-fusion-ignition