Big science, big risks

Found myself unsurprised to hear GreenPeace was less than thrilled to hear the Iter project is actually enroute to breaking ground in France.

I'm split on this. A bit sympathetic to the folk pointing out there are probably better immediate ways to spend ten billion Euros, if the immediate goal is cleaner power, yes. And there's little doubt in my mind that anxieties about how fusion technology might be used to enrich materials for nuclear weapons are quite well-founded. It's one of those aspects of human nature. If it can be used to make stuff to blow stuff up, seems to me, sure, it probably will be.

That said, nuclear fusion, long-term, has promises I figure make it so very worth pursuing. Done even poorly, the waste products are vastly more manageable than is the case with fission—with half-lives that make it much more practical to design and maintain programs for storage until they're benign. Done better, the waste could be close to nonexistent.

And at its fundamental level, the basic principle seems so very sensible. The thought that you can take a little mass and convert it directly to useful energy a la Einstein's most famous equation—and that the mass used can come from one of the most plentiful atoms in the universe, that's got the kind of elegant simplicity about it which, it seems to me, makes it madness not to look seriously into it.

It might also, though this is getting a bit ahead of things, get better still. I mean sure, there are a lot of stray neutrons to contend with in current designs (another problem which will generate waste products, and possibly a too-convenient way to make materials for bombs), but who's to say it's really so unmanageable? Theoretically, I'm hearing that it's not—that materials can be come up with that can take the flux without becoming too rapidly radioactive, and even when they do, the half-life is, again, probably manageable disposal-wise. So it seems to me getting hung up on that is short-sighted. Nothing about the basic process, I suspect, requires it be a long-term problem.

So reading the environmentalists' opposition, I find myself thinking it's a bit knee-jerk. As in: this is atomic power, and that's bad. So no, let's not go there.

I completely agree with them on fission. Always have, and have had the odd argument with folks pointing out that at least that technology doesn't have an impact on carbon emissions. The half-lives of the by-products just aren't manageable, given any kind of knowledge of human history. When what's left over is that dangerous, for so long—longer, remember, than most mass human civilizations have tended to survive—producing them strikes me as a really bad idea. I mean, bad with a hubris that's nothing less than staggering. And the very nature of the fission process—setting off a reaction that wants more than just about anything else to take off exponentially—has always struck me as playing with fire.

But fusion isn't fission. And just because it isn't economical today, doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to make it so. The economy is right there, staring back at us from fundamental equations. And, though this might also prove to be hubris, making it reality might prove even less trouble than we think.

So I guess I'm saying: good for Iter. Big science, big risk, sure. But one worth taking.