Nuclear fusion offers safe and clean energy, but experts say enviros will still oppose it
As critics have argued, the modern environmental movement is primarily anti-human, so they will find reasons to oppose fusion, regardless of how safe and clean it may be, for the same reasons they oppose nuclear fission.
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Virginia Gov. Glenn Younkin announced last month that the largest private fusion company in the U.S. had selected the state to be the location for a multi-billion dollar investment in the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant. Commonwealth Fusion Systems promises to deliver power to the grid within a decade from a facility 16 miles south of Richmond.
Fusion power has been getting a lot of attention lately, including a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing in September, with a panel of experts speaking optimistically on the development of the technology.
Even if developers manage to overcome the technical challenges of bringing fusion energy to fruition, nuclear proponents say that the barriers to development of nuclear fission remain political and not technical or economical. There’s little reason to think the same political challenges could stand in the way of fusion, even if the technology is realized. [...]
Net fusion energy
In 2022, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, became the only facility to achieve what’s called “net fusion energy,” which is a fusion reaction producing more energy than the reaction required. The reaction released 3.15 million joules of energy and required 2.05 million joules of laser power to produce it. The 3.15 million joules is the equivalent of 875 watt hours. That could power a small refrigerator for about 3.5 hours.
While the experiment produced more energy than it consumed, the facility cost $3.5 billion to produce electricity that would cost a residential U.S. energy consumer about 15 cents at the average U.S. rate. The cost of the facility doesn’t include overhead, including utilities, staff and the fuel used in the experiment.
This means that fusion is a long way from being commercially viable, but at the Senate Energy Committee hearing the panel of experts said they could see it happening within the next decade. [...]
Opposition
A group of analysts who publish on the Substack “Doomberg,” point out that limitless, zero-carbon power already exists. The main issue, they explain, is environmental groups who oppose it are fundamentally anti-human.
While fission carries risks, major accidents — primarily Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl — represent only three of the 440 reactors operating in the world today. In the case of Three Mile Island and Fukushima, there were no deaths or serious radiation exposure. The Chernobyl accident was the result of a flawed reactor design no longer in use.
“The prospect of cheap, abundant energy for the masses was considered no solution at all to the elites who founded many of the well-known environmental groups still in operation today, individuals that understood all too well that nuclear power from fission was capable of providing an energy bounty with minimal damage to the environment. Thus began a decades-long propaganda campaign directed at the technology that continues to this day,” Doomberg writes.
The Doomberg analysts point out that reactor designs today, requiring no new inventions, are already commercially demonstrated. They have become safe enough to all but eliminate the risk of meltdowns, and nuclear waste is not the problem nuclear opponents make it out to be.
“The stated purpose of fusion solves problems that don’t exist,” Doomberg states.
As others have argued, the modern environmental movement is primarily anti-human, so they will find reasons to oppose fusion, regardless of how safe and clean it may be, for the same reasons they oppose nuclear fission. And they have plenty of resources to fight it. [more]
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