Humans are creative.
We tap into just about anything we can think of for sweet, sweet power: oil, coal, natural gas, corn, sugarcane, algae, wind, water, solar, etc. Every bit of Mother Nature's bounty has its own pros and cons (let these oil-covered penguins pull at your heartstrings). Truthfully, none are too great, and every one is ultimately finite.
Nuclear fission—the technology currently used in nuclear power plants—can produce significant power, but also creates radioactive, long-lasting isotopes which makes plants dangerous if something goes wrong (i.e. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima), and presents problems for disposal. First developed in the atomic bomb, it works by unleashing energy by splitting an atom.
But doing the inverse of fission—fusing two atoms together—produces none of the more dangerous isotopes, and could theoretically produce limitless clean energy. That’s why scientists were so excited about the commercial use of fusion after they developed the technique for the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s (unfortunate that all our nuclear technology arises from us wanting to kill each other, eh?). They predicted commercial use could be just around the corner.
Sadly 60 years later, scientists still haven’t been able to develop a self-sustaining model.
But hallelujah 2014 – Californian scientists have just made landmark history in fusion advancement by bombarding a capsule of hydrogen with lasers. For the first time ever, more energy was released from their contained fusion experiment than they put into it (kind of priority number one for energy sources). The results were extremely modest — the equivalent of 17 seconds of solar energy falling on the earth in full daylight—but a clear step in the right direction.
Scientists have declined to make predictions on how long it might take to come up with a commercial reactor, but they are reportedly “working like mad.” (You might even say, like mad scientists.) Hip-hip hooray for technology! We’ll assume there won’t be any unintended consequences—and if history is any indication (ever heard of the “Radium Girls”?), we should be solid on that. (Image: commons.wikimedia.org)
