EDITORIAL: How to insulate planet Earth against rising temperatures that pose a serious threat to life on it. How to prevent climate change by neutralising global warming by de-carbonisation of the energy sources.
The answers to these questions lie in sharpening focus on increasing inputs by many other than fossil-fuelled sources like solar, wind, battery storage and nuclear fission. But for decades scientists have also been wondering how the sun and stars shine and warm up the earth.
They now have uncovered the mystery thanks to the process of fusion. And that has been achieved, although on a laboratory scale at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. In there, they produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.
Nuclear power plants employ fission to produce energy (nuclear fission is a reaction in which the nucleus of the atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei). In nuclear fusion, pairs of tiny particles called atoms are heated and forced together to make one heavier one.
At the lab scientists focused beams on hydrogen isotope target smaller than a pea, producing a fusion reaction that for an instant generated more power than it took to start.
Potentially, this fusion breakthrough is a step toward harnessing the process that fires the sun to generate carbon-free electricity. So far the LLNL was focused on national security and nuclear weapons by way of fission. But now that it has succeeded in fusing two light hydrogen atoms to make one heavier helium atom releasing large amount of energy, the lab director Kim Budil thinks that “it is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity”.
Like fission, fusion is carbon-free during operation. It poses no risk of nuclear disaster and produces much less radioactive waste. Will the nuclear fusion technology ever move out of the LLNL and become available for industrial use.
It sure can and would, only if the developed world’s governments permit - as a prototype fusion power plant could be available by 2030s.
Pakistan needs clean air and carbon-free environment more urgently than any other country. And given the country’s wherewithal to master nuclear fission technology at the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL), it appears to have the required capacity to go for nuclear fusion as well.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022