How Nuclear Fusion can change the World

[Photo Source: Siemens]

Why Fusion?

To slow down global warming we have to strive for an energy-industry without the emission of greenhouse gases. The climate conference of Paris in 2015 was a good start. One of the main purposes of this accord was to decrease the amount of greenhouse gas emission, so that global warming stays limited to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius. Coal and oil are extremely polluting – we burn it to generate energy, but this process releases carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas. Although natural gas is not as polluting, it’s still not ideal. The accords were signed by 174 countries, recently America (Donald Trump) decided to step out if this accord. Still, renewable sources like wind and solar, will be playing a significantly larger role in the decades to come. A variety of countries even set a goal to go 100% green by 2050.

Although some countries can theoretically run on renewables only, global this would still be a problem. Renewables depend on mother nature. They can’t provide a base load of energy, which makes them less reliable. There have been proposals to solve this, like placing solar panel bases in the deserts of North-Africa, to supply energy. Although this might seem like a reliable solution, there are some other downsides. Economically, this is almost impossible to realize. Saving energy or expanding the current electricity grid would likely double the production cost of green energy – and this cost is already high. We can conclude that there is another solution needed, a reliable, clean, independent and economically viable solution. This is where nuclear fusion comes in.

To understand why fusion is so promising, we need to take a look at what the advantages and disadvantages of other sustainable energy sources are. Although technically nuclear fusion is not a sustainable energy source (we might eventually run out of deuterium and tritium), it has the same characteristics: it’s clean and it’s long term. It would be able to compensate our energy needs for hundreds of thousands of years, which is long enough for us to innovate the process and use different fuels. Probably even a different source of energy (like antimatter annihilation!), but I digress. We’ve talked about the downsides of solar and wind but there is another big player in the game: nuclear fission.
This is what will be handled next post.

Thanks for reading part 9. Hope you learned something!