This commentary is by John Greenberg, a resident of Marlboro.
Tom Evslin uses the recent announcement of progress in nuclear fusion to suggest that “we wouldn’t even have to nag people to stop using energy to save the planet,” that there would be “no need for fields of intermittently-operating solar panels or huge wind turbines,” and that there would be “no reason not to use some fossil fuels where their energy densities make them more practical than batteries.”
His argument relies on two fundamental errors.
The first concerns the fusion experiment itself. It’s true that, as he points out, “an experiment produced about 50% more energy from a target mass than the energy directed at that mass to get it to fuse.”
But — and it’s a huge “but” — the energy directed at the mass was far less than the energy it took to produce it. Specifically, “researchers pumped in 2.05 megajoules of laser energy and got about 3.15MJ out,” but this “calculation does not include the 300 or so megajoules needed to power up the lasers in the first place.” In other words, the energy generated was roughly 1% of the total energy required to produce it.
In addition, “The NIF lasers fire about once a day, but a power plant would need to heat targets 10 times per second. Then there is the cost of the targets. The ones used in the U.S. experiment cost tens of thousands of dollars, but for a viable power plant, they would need to cost pence. Another issue is how to get the energy out as heat.”
There are more problems, but these are certainly sufficient to suggest that commercial fusion is still a very long way off.
That leads to the second problem, which is a fundamental problem of human energy use and the planet we inhabit and the dynamics of American government.
Money spent on a fusion Manhattan Project is money not spent on developing renewable energy projects right now, each of which displaces yet more carbon and methane being injected into the atmosphere to meet our energy needs.
Worse, the 20 years that Evslin wishfully allots to developing commercial fusion are precisely the 20 years that will determine whether we irreversibly destroy the natural climate balance which has facilitated human civilizations and progress or whether we hurl forward into environmental chaos.
And that’s generously assuming that, unlike every other time we’ve been promised commercial fusion in a few decades, this time it actually succeeds.
If we’re going to invest in a Manhattan Project, it should be, first, figuring out how to actually achieve the energy efficiency goals that report after report has shown are not just possible, but far cheaper than any energy generation and far better for the environment.
Next would be clearing every possible obstacle to the development of renewable technologies that have now been proven to work successfully and to be environmentally far more benign than any generating alternative.
Doing either — or, even better, both — would immediately reduce the amount of additional carbon and methane injected into the atmosphere, save tens of thousands of lives (EPA estimates of the human cost of burning fossil fuels) and save billions of dollars.
It would even free up enough savings to fund ongoing fusion research with otherwise limited taxpayer dollars.
