The Power of the Sun In the Palm of My Hand.

Nuclear fusion. The elusive Holy Grail for unlimited energy and power. Literally, the power of the sun.

For rest of the world, it’s tomatoe/tomato, but for us nerds, nuclear power has been categorized into two boxes. The first is the one we all know and love/hate – fission. It’s what our current nuclear power plants deliver using Uranium rods and cooling towers, providing tons of nuclear waste, and memorable terms like TMI and Chernobyl (and closer to home Rancho Seco).  It was fission that levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it’s fission that fuels our weapons stockpile.

And fission is the coffee to fusion’s uncut cocaine.

But fission was relatively easy to figure out. slap some destabilized materials together and Kablam!  But fission, however awe-inspiring in it’s display of raw power, is very unrefined and very dirty. But that works in our favor. Had the Big Boy worked out the way we theorized in paper, the entire Pacific theatre, and ultimately life on this planet as we know it, would have been vaporized, with nuclear fission reaching a self-feeding threshold until no matter was left to fuel the radioactive fire.

But fusion is a whole nother story. On paper, it’s much cleaner, much more efficient, and elegant. But in reality, the dream was yet to be.  It’s not easy to harness the power of the sun, especially when you don’t understand it fully. But we believe it will ultimately power our drive through the solar system, if not the galaxy.  It will open up a new era in technological and social evolution. Just imagine a gram of raw material able to power the entire NYC metropolitan area for a month. But there are problems to the perfect solution. How do you contain that kind of power for a sustained amount of time? How to you control it? Once you turn it on, can it be turned off? And there are the intricacies we need to grab hold of before we can fully embrace the wonder.  The power of the sun, even when understood on paper, has its anomolies. Solar wind, sun spots (and their seemingly cyclic patterns).

Let’s put the power of the sun into perspective. Our little blue marble is roughly 93 million miles away from the sun.  Yet, on a hot summer day, we can easily get sunburned. and without the protective ozone layer, we’d all have a very uncomfortable time sustaining life on this planet. Solar flares risk knocking out communications satellites and disrupting cellphone service. The sun itself is so immense, it comprises over 99.8% of our total solar system by mass. And in the duration of the oldest dating we can do of our own planet, roughly 3.9 billion years (excluding about another billion for formation and cooling), so our stellar power plant has been illuminating our skies for nearly five billion years. And during that time, it burns approximately 700 million tons of hydrogen is fused into helium, releasing five tons of raw energy, every second. Considering the seconds in an hour, in  a day, in a year, per century, over the millenia, that for as long as mankind has been getting sunburned, the sun has barely broke a sweat, using less than one percent of its mass.

In Spiderman 2, Otto Octavius had the fantastic dream of recreating and then harnessing the power of the sun using lasers and resonating magnetic fields. He nearly wiped out all of Manhattan with a few grams of trittium.

. . . in the palm of my hand!

Recipe for a star

In the real world, such notions were science fiction. I stress were, because the geniuses at Lawrence Livermore labs, the birthplace of Tron, have stumbled upon science fact. Using very powerful lasers and trittium. No kidding.

Ignore the fanfare of the world’s most powerful laser being developed for this science fair project.  This facility is going to give a very unique view of the fundamental forces of our existance in a way the Hubble Telescope opened up a new window to our universe. In fact, while Hubble will show us what’s out there, this will help explain the hows and whys.

My jaw drops at the possibilities of this science. My heart sinks at the notions of potential of weaponized technologies. Imagine a five-megaton nuclear warhead compacted into the size of a 9mm bullet.