The shot heard around the world

The National Ignition Facility recently made an important breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Is it enough to eventually save us from our adversity to energy policy intelligence?

The author, monitoring a particle accelerator experiment at the University of Kentucky, circa 1990

In December of 2022, the National Ignition Facility, a part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, achieved a milestone in nuclear fusion. With a nanosecond long, 2 megajoule burst of infrared laser light, split into multiple beams, the NIF imploded a fuel pellet, initiating a brief fusion reaction which produced roughly 3 megajoules of energy.

Three megajoules is a modest amount of energy in the grand scale of things (it's about the caloric energy in a candy bar), but this experiment achieved a milestone nonetheless. The energy transferred by the laser beam into the fuel pellet was less than the energy produced by the resulting fusion reaction by enough of a margin to meet a significant benchmark in fusion energy research. It's a big deal.

Fusion is the nuclear reaction that powers our own Sun and every visible star in the heavens. Fusion is a process that involves “fusing” smaller atoms into larger atoms. When fusion occurs, the nuclear mass of the new atom is less than the sum of the masses of the individual particles that went into it's creation.

The “missing mass” is converted into energy at a rate of E = mc². In a large enough fusion reaction, this can lead to a staggering amount of energy released.

It's not exaggerating to state that we live in a nuclear-powered universe. But even in the depths of our sun, where pressures are high enough to squeeze atoms with unimaginable fury, fusion reactions occur at a relatively modest rate. It's only due to the great volume and mass of our sun's interior that nuclear fusion is able produce the tremendous amounts of heat and light that flow from the sun throughout our solar system.

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, roughly a century ago, we've exploited a different nuclear reaction, nuclear fission, to produce commercial nuclear energy. Fission is a nuclear reaction that involves splitting large, heavy atoms into lighter ones, also converting matter into to energy.

The problem with fission as a source of energy is not that it doesn't work. Fission has been demonstrably viable as a commercial source of carbon-free energy, for decades. The problem with nuclear fission it's that it comes with a set of concomitant issues that demand attention.

The extraction of fissile materials from the ground, via mining, is an environmental issue. Fission reactors have radioactive cores which must be carefully monitored and maintained. Fission produces radioactive waste which must be rendered inert, or stored until it is either rendered inert or it decays into a more benevolent state. The vast array of nuclear reactors in many varieties has made the proliferation of weapons-grade materials an issue around the world.

Fusion, by contrast, is relatively clean. The fuel required is found in abundance in seawater. The byproduct of a fusion reaction is, for the most part, energy. The difficulty is getting fusion to work on a commercial scale. That's the significance of the recent NIF experiment. It's a good stride in the right direction.

Sustained nuclear fusion, being difficult to achieve even in the favorable conditions found in the core of our sun, is really difficult to achieve in a laboratory. It's not overly problematic to produce a single fusion event – even big ones (look up hydrogen bombs). It's sustaining fusion in a manner suitable for the production of energy at a commercially useful scale, that's elusive.

There have been two approaches used to produce nuclear fusion in a lab: inertial confinement and magnetic confinement. Both have, so far, met with limited success.

Inertial confinement, the approach used in the NIF experiment, uses an array of lasers to blast the surface of a spherical fuel pellet, causing it to implode. Under the right conditions, the shock wave from the blast moving inward produces pressures high enough at the center of the pellet to induce a fusion reaction and a brief burst of energy.

Magnetic confinement uses a tokamak, a device akin to a furnace, where the fuel is heated to a plasma state and squeezed with magnetic fields to produce fusion.

Up until now, magnetic confinement was thought to be the scheme most likely to yield sustainable nuclear fusion first. But the 2 MJ in/3 MJ out burst at the NIF in the early morning hours of December 5^th was, in the field of fusion research, the shot heard around the world.

All nuclear processes involve energy densities which are orders of magnitude higher than any chemical process for producing energy, like burning fossil fuels. Nuclear processes are also orders of magnitudes higher than renewables (solar and wind). It's just a matter of time until we are able to make the conversion from liquid fossil fuels to nuclear power, supplemented by renewable energy. That's indisputably the future.

But I doubt seriously that we are getting there anytime soon. In the immediate future, regardless of what exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics that places California attempt to legislate, liquid fossil fuels aren't going anywhere. The accessibility, energy density and convenience of oil and gas are just too high. Renewables cannot, unfortunately, get us from where we are to where we need to be by themselves. The math doesn't even come close to adding up.

Unless, that is, you subscribe to the notion, popular among the green lobby, “What's a few orders of magnitude between friends?”

All of this drives me nuts. It's not just that what passes for energy policy in this country is asinine, it's that our collective understanding the scale, scope and value of energy production is severely wanting. And the people who yell loudest and seem the most angry about how energy is produced now seem to know the least about it.

Allowing the most ignorant to lead the way won't do. If we are to transition away from fossil fuels, without social and economic disruptions that few will enjoy, we are going to have to up our game.

To be clear, climate change, which is driving all of this, is a real problem - one that we need to address. We've used our atmosphere as a dump for the waste gasses generated in the production of food, materials and energy, for several millennia. This has resulted in a warming planet.

Has Earth been warmer in the distant past? Yes, it has. But not since the continents have been arranged as they are now and, most significantly, not since humans have been around.

For several centuries, our use of wood, coal and oil for energy introduced a glut of particulate matter into the atmosphere, along with carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gasses. This particulate matter (a component of smog) helped keep global temperatures down by intercepting some of the incoming light from the sun and preventing it from heating the atmosphere (as it does which reaches the ground).

Volcanic eruptions do the same thing, i.e., prevent light from the sun from reaching the earth's surface and heating the atmosphere, with the sulfur dioxide particles they emit. One may easily correlate major volcanic eruptions with temporary dips in global temperature.

When we succeeded in the 20^th century, in eliminating many of the particulates introduced into the atmosphere during energy production and consumption, we also removed this temporary control over increasing temperatures. That's a principle reason we've seen such a dramatic increase in global temperatures in just the last few decades.

Is living on a warming planet bad? Probably – but I'm not buying the more apocalyptic predictions, just yet anyway, simply because reliable data isn't there. I suspect that we're in for some challenges, but who knows to what degree?

I don't know how bad the effects of climate change will be, I do know how bad the effects of running out of energy would be. It's a long list, and it includes being poor, being hungry and thirsty, and not having secure places to live, work and raise families. That sounds to me like a recipe for war, murder and violence.

We addressed these issues in our past with the help of energy consumption. The world is indisputably a better place now than it was when we hunted for dinner with stone knives and wooden spears. So rather than eschew, with contempt, the tools which have provided us with comfort, prosperity and all of the wonders of the modern age, perhaps we ought to be grateful for what we have. Further, I suspect that it's far more productive to work at ameliorating the side effects of the tools that we used to bootstrap ourselves to wealth and security, than it is to just piss, moan and complain about them.

Nuclear energy is the biggest player in the path forward to cleaner energy. But until we get commercially viable fusion reactors up and running, something that's still probably decades away, we need to invest in the next generation of fission reactors. We also need to mitigate the polluting effects of liquid fuels, which are not going anywhere, and ramp up the use of renewables, as we can.

Renewables are not a panacea. They come with their own sets of issues – reliability being front and center. We do not currently have the capacity to convert everything to electricity from renewables even if they worked like pomade on date night.

Right now electric cars are supposed to be the solution for nearly all that ails us. My wife and I happen to own an electric SUV, a Ford Mach-E, that is fantastic for our particular use – her commute to and from work. But it’s simply not as practical as our gas and diesel-powered vehicles for everything else. It's also a luxury purchase, well beyond the means of many to own or to operate. I don't see these taking over the way the green lobby imagines anytime soon.

I have great faith in humans and our ability to grow, adapt and change with the times. We are industrious users of tools and technology. We've invented, just recently in terms of human history, radio, airplanes, television, modern electronics, computers, and thanks to Al Gore, the Internet. We've harnessed the power of the sun in a laboratory. Most of this would have been unimaginable less than two hundred years ago. Yet, here we are.

There are, right now, emerging technologies which yield the promise of mining our atmosphere for greenhouse gasses and recycling them into liquid fuels. There are serious geoengineering proposals that could put a big dent, if not reverse, global warming. I think that in the fullness of time we have the opportunity to be just fine on the energy front, with enough for both global prosperity and a reduction of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

But, perhaps that's just me. I'm a physicist and an optimist. I always see the potential in science for a better world. I reckon that not everyone does.

The New York Post has reported that President Biden recently told a group at a Democratic fundraiser in New York that global warming is the greatest threat ever faced by humanity. Even greater, he claimed, than nuclear war.

This claim is, in my view, nonsensical. It's also alarming coming from the leader of the free world. Even if the most apocalyptic predictions of climate change were to come true, most of humanity would still be alive and able to effect solutions to their plight. That's a situation highly unlikely to have a close parallel after a large nuclear war.

It's hyperbolic stupidity like this that gets in the way of moving forward in when it comes to the complexities of energy, climate and politics. It's silly, soundbite ignorance like this that takes up all of the oxygen in an important national discussion.

I'm just glad that the scientists and engineers at the NIF are able to ignore the hype and move us, albeit ever so slowly, in the right direction. Good on 'em.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth