Today the Department of Energy announced what I heard about over the weekend; there was a successful fusion ignition at Livermore National Lab. Hey, that’s near my brother’s house and a key research facility during WWII alongside Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. If I remember some History books on espionage, Soviet operators liked to poke around the SF area to see how the Manhattan Project was going.
I’m confident investigations will follow for a couple years to confirm what I’m really hoping they actually did, produced more energy than they put in to get what has been happening in the Sun for five billion years. Livermore’s technique is the less popular laser-based ignition; others prefer a series of magnets. Either way, it doesn’t matter in the short run, as per The Guardian the energy given off wasn’t enough to power a tea kettle. But it’s a start! Finding a mega-joule-based laser is always going to be the hardest part, especially when they’re attached to a shark’s head.
The CNN clip had a pretty calm Q&A despite the network taking a hard right to double down on the aging Boomer world view. Our Secretary of Energy definitely set expectations adequately on how much further we need to go (dammit) yet it’s good to know Grampa Brunch considers this a priority. Now get ready for the GOP-controlled House to derailed it for more polluting oil. I didn’t think the correspondent’s question about how this tech may come to us too late was out of line; she said won’t this happen well after the tipping point (on the greenhouse effects). Thanks to GOP and NeoLiberal bullshit (aka Boomer selfishness), the road to sustainable fusion power got hobbled over the decades unless it perfected killing millions of Russian or Mandarin or feather-bedded Boomer priorities. If we’re lucky, the transition will have less disruption than what our ancestors experienced when the West switched from wood to coal or coal to oil. With the former, they waited until they were screwed when all the forests were mostly gone. HG Wells said it best…
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.