The timeline of history is etched not just by wars and revolutions but also by moments when science yields a discovery that forever changes the course of humanity.
It appears we’re at precisely one of those moments.
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists reproduced the power of the sun, a massive milestone that opens the door for the kind of fusion found in stars to one day power the world’s homes, businesses, cars and economies.
The holy grail behind this achievement came in the form of “net energy gain,” the creation of a nuclear reaction that yielded more energy than what was needed to initiate the reaction. Livermore scientists did this by blasting a pencil eraser-sized capsule containing hydrogen with 192 lasers. The result was the production of 50% more energy than the laser beams had delivered.
Granted, it will take decades to transform the breakthrough into a future in which fusion power plants become as everyday as, well, stars in the sky. This is primarily because there’s a colossal amount of scaling up necessary before fusion power could ever run our vacuum cleaners and iPhone chargers.
The laser used in the experiment is the world’s most powerful, but it can muster only about 10 shots each week. Commercial energy production would need something in the order of 10 laser shots per second. And while the energy produced by the laser was less than the energy created by the fusion reaction, powering up the lasers required 100 times more energy.
Then there’s the massive transformation in infrastructure that would have to occur — not just bricks and mortar to house “miniature sun” power stations, but also a vast, new network of transmission lines to distribute the energy.
Skeptics have pounced on the breakthrough, dismissing it as impractical and steeped in hype. “I’m skeptical of surprisingly well-timed announcements by budget-starved laboratories about breakthroughs for technologies decades away,” tweeted Javier Blas, energy and commodities columnist at Bloomberg.
No doubt, it’s important to scrutinize scientific advancements with the strongest lens possible. Still, skeptics are missing the point.
Breakthroughs like the one that occurred at Livermore reinforce the idea that scientific endeavors aren’t merely academic exercises justifying the existence of laboratories and white-smocked researchers — they routinely yield practical applications that change our world. Some can be turned around into everyday use in a matter of years; some, such as fusion energy, likelier will take decades.
The better way to view the work at Livermore is to embrace it as a potential springboard to a monumental shift in the way we generate energy, allowing us to save the planet from further climate change damage.
That doesn’t mean we should view this as a license to continue spewing millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or cling to our dependence on fossil fuels. The march toward renewable energy sources — wind, solar, geothermal — must not only proceed, but its pace also should be quickened. Our climate change portfolio should include carbon taxes, a marked expansion of the development and production of batteries for electric vehicles, and more.
Nevertheless, the work at Livermore should be seen as a green light for research that’s needed to one day revolutionize the way energy is produced and distributed. Congress recently channeled $713 million toward fusion research. That’s a good start, and now there’s rock-solid proof that clean fusion energy isn’t just a pipe dream.
The day fusion anchors the world’s power grids may be decades away, but it would be a monumental mistake if we didn’t see the merit in working toward that possibility now.
