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I continue to find it strange beyond words that the Pentagon is now in the midst of "modernizing" the American nuclear arsenal to the tune of perhaps $2 trillion in the coming decades. I'm sorry, are we really talking about the bombs that once destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki now multiplied in power unbelievably many times over? Are we really talking about weaponry that could, if ever used, leave whole countries in the all-too-literal dust and this planet in a nuclear winter in which billions of us would starve to death? Are these truly the weapons you want to "modernize"?
Only recently, the Air Force proudly rolled out a new nuclear bomber as if on a Hollywood set and there's so much else still to come, including " hooray! Hurrah! " a "next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile" and a new Columbia Class nuclear submarine, the first of which, the District of Columbia, had a keel-laying ceremony last June. Those subs, the largest ever built by this country, will each house 16 nuclear missiles and have its own nuclear reactor that won't need to be refueled even once during its lifetime of "service." It can, in other words, be eternally deployed, ready to destroy the world at a moment's notice. Honestly, what could possibly go wrong when you're hard at work modernizing " how else to put it? " the apocalypse?
Today, Joshua Frank, author of a riveting new book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the place in this country most likely to give us our own Chernobyl, suggests how the U.S. military's nuclear modernization project could be taking an all-too-postmodern form. As the headlines have made clear lately, there's been a breakthrough in nuclear fusion that, "deployed on a large scale," so the New York Times reported, "would offer an energy source devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants."
Or wait a sec! As Frank explains today, it might indeed prove a true breakthrough, though not in making our overheating world a safer place but in preparing to destroy it. Tom
Nuclear Fusion Won't Save the Climate
But It Might Blow Up the World
By Joshua Frank
I awoke on December 13th to news about what could be the most significant scientific breakthrough since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first Covid vaccine for emergency use two years ago. This time, however, the achievement had nothing to do with that ongoing public health crisis. Instead, as the New York Times and CNN alerted me that morning, at stake was a new technology that could potentially solve the worst dilemma humanity faces: climate change and the desperate overheating of our planet. Net-energy-gain fusion, a long-sought-after panacea for all that's wrong with traditional nuclear-fission energy (read: accidents, radioactive waste), had finally been achieved at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
"This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy," exclaimed White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar.
The New York Times was quick to follow Prabhakar's lead, boasting that fusion is an "energy source devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gasses caused by the burning of fossil fuels." Even Fox News, not exactly at the top of anyone's list of places focused on climate change, jumped on the bandwagon, declaring fusion "a technology that has the potential to accelerate the planet's shift away from fossil fuels and produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy."
All in all, the reviews for fusion were positively glowing and it seemed to make instant sense. After all, what could possibly be wrong with something that might end our reliance on fossil fuels, even as it reduced the risks posed by our aging nuclear industry? The message, repeated again and again in the days that followed: this was a genuine global-warming game-changer.
After all, in the fusion process, no atoms have to be split to create heat. Gigantic lasers are used, not uranium, so there's no toxic mining involved, nor do thousands of gallons of cold water have to be pumped in to cool overheated reactors, nor will there be radioactive waste byproducts lasting hundreds of thousands of years. And not a risk of a nuclear meltdown in sight! Fusion, so the cheery news went, is safe, effective, and efficient!
Or is it?
The Big Catch
On a very basic level, fusion is the stuff of stars. Within the Earth's sun, hydrogen combines with helium to create heat in the form of sunlight. Inside the walls of the Livermore Lab, this natural process was imitated by blasting 192 gigantic lasers into a tube the size of a baby's toe. Inside that cylinder sat a "hydrogen-encased diamond." When the laser shot through the small hole, it destroyed that diamond quicker than the blink of an eye. In doing so, it created a bunch of invisible x-rays that compressed a small pellet of deuterium and tritium, which scientists refer to as "heavy hydrogen."
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