Sunnyside Saturday

It’s Saturday and that’s the happiest day of the work week (in my opinion).  And so today can’t be doom and gloom day.  No end of the world stuff or triumphant deep state conspiracy theories for me today.

I was just watching a YouTube video about why commercial nuclear fusion is fifty years away and always will be (ha ha).  And of course there were no surprises there.  The sheer magnitude of the temperatures, pressures, magnetic flux and energy consumption needed to make this process work is beyond daunting.  It’s technical lunacy.  When you look at where nuclear fusion does exist (a star), what you realize is that this is an environment where gravity can compete against the electromagnetic force head-to-head.  That is not going to happen in our labs and factories.  So, we have to pay for magnetic containment and we pay by the gigawatt-hour.  It’s not a good trade-off.

When I try to imagine what practical controlled nuclear fusion would look like I conjure up a tiny gun shooting tritium nuclei, one at a time, into a target of heavy water and boiling the heavy water to make steam.  It’s my version of the “Back to the Future,” Mr. Fusion engine that runs Doc Brown’s time machine at the end of the movie.  The breakthrough is that I’m able (by magic) to keep the energy expenditure for the tritium gun down to the level of what I can extract from a USB cable on my MP3 player.  Of course, where I get the radioactive tritium from and how I keep myself from being irradiated while riding in my fusion powered car are at this point undetermined.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Given a thousand years I think we’ll make real progress on commercial nuclear fusion or find out it’s not feasible.  And I think research on it is a very good idea, if for no other reason than that it will spawn innumerable amazing technological byproducts that may be even more beneficial than the primary problem.  But I think we should all put aside any dreams of living in a world powered by nuclear fusion (unless some wise guy figures out that cold fusion is an actual thing).

But all of this is just the intro to my main thought.  And that is what would life on Earth be like if energy really were essentially free.  Now I don’t mean free, free.  The infrastructure for breeder reactors and handling their waste products will be an incredibly complicated and expensive industry that will employ a good chunk of the technically minded part of the population.  And maintaining a power grid and the other allied industries that will grow up around very cheap electricity (e.g., syn-fuel) has always been a big piece of modern life.

But imagine if you can what kinds of problems would be solvable if essentially limitless power were available.  For instance, what if desalination of sea water could be accomplished at a scale to be able to farm the Sahara Desert?  Think of the engineering projects that become feasible if power is no longer a problem.

And all chemical synthesis is available if the power to provide the potential to run the reaction in your direction is provided.  We could even start making cars out of metal again.  I’ve always dreamed of having a car that was immune to road salt corrosion.  Hastelloy C, Tantalum, or boring old titanium?

But the best part of all is imagining that my electric bill for my home heating and cooling and lighting is zippity doo dah all the way up to some pretty impressive electrical usage.  Hell, even I would give up my oil heat and use resistance heating just for the sake of getting rid of that damn furnace that’s always breaking down.  And I want them to throw in free fuel for my car up to let’s say a couple of thousand miles worth a week.  Ah, what a wonderful world it could be without technophobes.

Alright, all optimism for the week officially used up.