On Tuesday morning, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy. It’s a milestone of great significance, BillMcKibben writes—“in essence, the researchers are learning to build a second sun.”
On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough: according to early reports, scientists at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant. It’s a breakthrough of great significance—in essence, the researchers are learning to build a second sun.
Happily, we have a bridge technology that might get us through those decades: it’s the first sun, the one that hangs in the sky above Lawrence Livermore and the rest of the planet. We know how to capture its rays on photovoltaic panels, and we know how to take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, creating breeze that we can capture in giant turbines.
A reason that the breakthrough is causing such hoopla is that it implicitly promises that we could use fusion to run the world in almost its current form. It’s centralized power that fits the old model that electricity should move down a one-way grid to its final users, instead of an interlocked web of smaller-scale solar and wind providers. We like the status quo, all else being equal. But that bias shades other new research that might point us in equally fascinating directions.
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