Me, talking about fusion and clean energy revolutions

In this episode, as a guest on Canadian daily news podcast The Big Story, I discuss a momentous fusion breakthrough, just how close we actually are to a future of unlimited clean energy (hint: not very), and where we should be focusing instead.

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(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on the Canadian daily news podcast The Big Story, chatting with host Jordan Heath-Rawlings about the big fusion news from December, the public’s hunger for energy breakthroughs, and the energy revolution that’s going on before our very eyes while we get lost in sci-fi fantasies.

It was fun! The team was kind enough to allow me to share it as an episode of Volts, so please enjoy, and go ahead and subscribe to The Big Story wherever you get your podcasts.

Frequency Podcast Network

You're listening to a Frequency podcast network production in association with City News.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings

If you've listened to this show for any length of time, you will know that we think scientific breakthroughs are cool, especially when they show us a path to a theoretically unlimited source of clean energy. When you look at the trouble we're in, it's easy to understand why anyone could get caught up in that height.

Media soundbite

The power that powers the sun, an abundant source of clean energy to help the planet kick its carbon addiction.

This is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.

It's a star in a box. Putting it in a box on Earth and tapping that energy that goes forever. It's what Iron Man has in his chest.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings

Now, here is where I get to be a buzzkill. When a scientific breakthrough hits the mainstream media, it's important to look immediately to the people who have covered the sector before that breakthrough. They are the ones who can separate hype from hope. And while, as I said, the fusion breakthrough in December was legitimately cool, ask some of the people who have been covering clean energy and the climate crisis and they'll tell you a story of other technologies.

The ones that we have right now, the ones that actually are changing the game we are currently playing and those people wonder why can't we focus on these things right now instead of waiting for a miracle? I'm Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is "The Big Story". David Roberts runs a newsletter and a podcast called Volts, which discusses clean energy and politics. You can find it at volts.wtf. That is an interesting suffix for your website.

David Roberts

Yes. I didn't even know it existed until I was trying to register a domain, and then I made a rather impulsive purchase.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings

Well, at least it's memorable. Now, before we get into what's going to happen in clean energy this year, which I'm really intrigued by, can you maybe quickly take us back to December? And I'm sure many people listening will remember a big headline and discussion about fusion. What was that news?

David Roberts

Sure. The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been experimenting with fusion for years and years now, and they just achieved a goal that they have been pursuing for a long time, which is they got more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put into it. And this is a big milestone in fusion research.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings

Why is that milestone, theoretically at least, so important?

David Roberts

Well, you have to untangle a few things. In the big picture, the hope is that eventually you can master fusion to the point that it can create clean energy because the fuels required to run fusion are cheap and abundant, it's carbon free. Theoretically, fusion power plants would have a very small footprint. So, from the energy perspective it's sort of this tantalizing utopian energy source. In the actual fusion world, the Lawrence Livermore Lab is not even in the business of researching fusion for energy production. They're actually more geared toward weapons research. There are other fusion companies pursuing energy production, but they use actually a fundamentally different technology, a fundamentally different form of fusion which has not reached this threshold, this breakthrough.

But there's lots of companies pursuing fusion and depending on how seriously you take their hype, maybe they'll be producing actual power plants that produce actual energy in a decade. Some of them are saying earlier than that, but they're also trying to raise money so one doesn't know how seriously to take them. But one thing to keep in mind is the Lawrence Livermore Facility costs about a billion dollars to create this small amount of energy it created. And the alternative forms of fusion claim that they will be able to create power plants for merely hundreds of millions of dollars. So, all of this is speculative and distant, let's say.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings

Well yeah, I mean we used theoretically a lot there, there's a lot of caveats I noticed that you kind of threw into your description of what could happen. But nevertheless, we begin the conversation here because I want you to tell me just a bit about how this went over in the mainstream news cycle because as I mentioned, this was a big deal in early December, right?

David Roberts

Well, there's a vision that has a hold of people's imagination of abundant clean energy produced in small power plants. And if you have sort of...

Jordan Heath-Rawlings

Like Sim City

David Roberts

Like Sim City. And if you have limitless energy with barely any fuel and no waste, there's all sorts of things you can think of you could do with limitless energy. You could for instance, desalinate water at scale with something which costs a lot of money and energy now. You could grow endless food. There's all kinds of stuff you can do if you have surplus abundant energy which fills people's heads with these sort of utopian futuristic visions.

And that vision I think, ends up causing people to sort of clutch to any announcement like this and say oh it's it's closer, it's going to happen, you know. But like fusion, fusion research has been sort of going through Hype cycles ever since 1950, mainly because of this Sci-Fi vision in people's heads. But you know, it just needs to be said over and over again. We are still very very far from that utopian vision of energy production. And, I would just like to remind everyone that we're in a climate crisis and we do not have decades to wait on an abundant source of clean energy.

So, even if the most sort of aggressive forecast, even if everything went very well, this is going to start generating energy well after the point that we need to have largely decarbonized already. So, there's sort of two categories people can think about. There's the near term decarbonization imperative and this is not particularly relevant to that. And then there's like the long term, post 2100 futuristic, "mankind expands to fill the