Liberal Forum

My entire life I’ve known of the promise of sustained nuclear fusion, even when I was a Republican.

—-US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made towards the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power.Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but until December no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a condition also known as ignition.

 Researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December, according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results.
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But since every decent, caring, and righteous person alive will welcome limitless energy, won’t MAGA be against it?

 Republicans are the reason it’s so hard for the nation to have nice things, you know?

(I can’t see very many MAGAS deep inside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  The very name sounds liberal as hell.)

One of my pet peeves is that every small advance in the pursuit of sustained nuclear fusion is hailed in the media as a "breakthrough". Of course all the outlets want more viewers. But it's up to the reader to put each advance in perspective.

As I understand it, the Lawrence Livermore ignition success brings us incrementally closer to commercially useful, clean energy from fusion. But realization of that goal is still many years in the future.

When the time actually draws close for nuclear fusion to replace most other sources of electricity, the Fossil Fuel Industries will probably oppose it. If they do, they will also grease the palms of politicians to write legislation inhibiting its use. And they will buy the efforts of mostly Republican politicians to create new, false narratives that sustained fusion is somehow undesirable. In that case, we could expect MAGA to be against it.

But if fossil fuel execs, atypically, invest in the future, they will get in on the ground floor and become part of the fusion industry themselves. There's probably plenty of time to observe what happens.