RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21182/race-for-nuclear-fusion-energy

The clean energy breakthrough everyone has been wishing for finally is here! It may not be quite ready for prime time, but a quiet nuclear-fusion energy race is underway and cannot come soon enough.

The problem is that China seems to be winning it, not the United States or the West.

It is nuclear fusion — making atoms collide, rather than splitting them, or fission — when two atoms are forced to combine into one new atom at extremely hot temperatures. “In order for fusion to occur on the very hot gas — or plasma,” notes euro-fusion.org, “the plasma must be heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Celsius [320 million degrees F]. ” The sun does it without a container — their combined new weight comes to less than each atom had separately.

This differential becomes a burst of energy that leaves no nuclear residue while functioning as if one had in one’s car a gallon of gas which could run it for 20 years. Fusion energy produced four times the power of fission energy, and when harnessed could be used as fuel for expeditions into outer space. Soon we shall presumably be able to say goodbye to expensive, combustible, warm-weather-only and not-very-far lithium batteries, and instead travel unpollutingly along on tiny bundles of captured energy.

The good news is that nuclear fusion, which is produced through nuclear reactors, tokamaks, leaves absolutely no residue.

The bad news is that — apart from needing further development and affordability — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems already to be working at warp-speed to develop this new form of energy for commercial and other use. China’s regime has reportedly allocated $1.5 billion annually to this effort, which would appear hardly enough, but is still nearly twice as much as the US is investing.

The CCP, moreover, has also reportedly been able to remove the most major drawback: a troublesome resin that impeded the fusion by lowering the temperature needed in the reactor, an impediment that was possibly overcome last month by changing the fuels and using the magnetic fields inside the tokamak — “the device that uses magnetic fields to confine a plasma” — to divert the plasma into a chamber the shape of a “cored apple.”

In the US, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk at Tesla and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the parent company of ChatGPT), have also been in this race to harness nuclear-fusion energy. Tesla bought SolarCity in 2006, originally to explore energy storage, but apparently also produce nuclear fusion energy. Altman took a nuclear energy company public for $500 million. One of his companies reportedly “has already secured a permit from the Department of Energy to build its first microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory.”

Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs have been exploring hydrogen-generated energy. At least for now, however, it seems that the method is carbon-intensive and converting the hydrogen into energy might still require more energy than it can produce.

Meanwhile, China, with at least three tokamak reactors, is speeding along to win the clean nuclear energy race – and its lucrative markets:

“China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion reactor on 28 May achieved another world record by maintaining a plasma temperature at 120 million decrees Celsius for 101 seconds and at 160 million Celsius for 20 seconds, a major step toward the test run of the fusion reactor. EAST is located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Science (ASIPP) in Hefei. It is one of three major domestic tokamaks now in operation in China.”

It is intensely to be hoped that the incoming administration will not allow China to eat America’s lunch.

Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-energy-apocalypse/

Someday our descendants will look back on the Age of Climate Change and marvel how a civilization with so much wealth, scientific knowledge, and sophisticated technologies could have willfully wrecked their economies and plunged themselves into poverty or extinction.

More astonishing to them, this civilizational suicide had been based on an unproven hypothesis like Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming––the idea that human-produced atmospheric CO2 emissions would destroy their civilization unless fossil fuels, the cheap, abundant energy that created the modern world, were abandoned.

Moreover, the portents of that future apocalypse are relentlessly multiplying across the rich Western nations, despite the ever-growing evidence that the hypothesis radically simplifies how a complex global climate works over space and time. More troubling, the proposed solution for lowering emissions enough to stave off the alleged disaster cannot be realized by eliminating fossil-fuels.

Thankfully, the election of Donald Trump offers hope that the suicidal “renewable” energy programs and policies will be rolled back.

For now, resistance to the zero net carbon narrative is growing. Even at the U.N.’s grand climate powwow held in Dubai in January, the UAE’s Minister of Industry, Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber, made the classic gaffe of speaking that truth out loud in front of the conclave of true believers. The Paris Accords’ goal to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 was a chimera: “‘There is no science out there, or no scenario out there that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,’ Al-Jaber said at an online event on Nov. 21, “adding a pointed barb to the hosts that it would be impossible to stop burning fossil fuels and sustain economic development, ‘unless you want to take the world back into caves.’”