I got my first post-collegiate job in 1982 as a nuclear engineer working on Naval submarines. Now some of you (and especially you liberal arts majors out there) are thinking, “Wow, that sounds both exciting and dangerous. Why wasn’t I trying to date THAT guy in college?” Okay, probably very few of you (or perhaps none of you) are thinking that and that’s very much off topic, although a lot of fun for me to think about from time to time. In those days, sometimes we’d sit around in the office and discuss politics and science and stuff and one topic that came up pretty often was fusion. Now fusion and fission (which is what powers those submarines) are about as different as night and day, but we all could read tech journals and we all had a passing knowledge on the subject of fusion. And all the tech journals were highly optimistic about fusion. Usually, they’d say something like “fusion energy generation is only a couple of decades away!” Then they’d go into detail about all the latest breakthroughs and the latest setbacks. The final conclusion was always that we were SO close.

My last year in nuclear engineering was in 1996 and the tech journals were still writing about fusion and the conclusions were exactly, and I do mean exactly, the same. We were SO close. Maybe only twenty or thirty years away. I continued to follow the discussion for a while after I left the field and the conclusions never changed. Eventually, I got bored and gave up following it.

So when I heard the news about the successful fusion test at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, I was practically giddy. FINALLY, we had achieved the elusive brass ring of fusion energy generation. Don’t get me wrong. Fusion doesn’t solve all of the problems humanity now faces, or even most of the problems we face, or even 99% of the problems we face. We’ll still figure out all kinds of ways to start wars and kill each other. Additionally, fusion will probably create about a thousand problems we haven’t previously even thought about. But it will solve the one big problem of clean energy generation.

So I was optimistic… for a while. Then I talked to a friend of mine who is involved in the energy industry. He wasn’t nearly as sanguine as I was about this as a scientific advance. He almost, dare I say it, sounded like he thought it wasn’t that big a deal. Then I read this article. Mr Racette thinks it’s REALLY not a big deal and his reasoning seems solid and pretty sobering.

So having been doused with about an ocean’s worth of cold water, I’m not feeling quite as mirthful about fusion as I was last week. That being said, I still think this is a good first step in a journey that’s going to take a lot of steps to complete. Each step is going to require money. Lots and lots of money. In light of that, I have a suggestion.

Back in August, Congress passed and the President signed the Inflation Reduction Act. Afterward, it became apparent that the Act had very little to do with reducing inflation and a whole lot to do with pouring money into green energy, especially wind and solar. Some of this money will be put to good use, but most of it will be squandered on make-work projects like they used to do to combat unemployment during the depression. They likely won’t do a bloomin’ thing for our energy security. To me, it would make sense to cut the money being spent on green energy as a result of this Act by about half and spend that part of it on fusion research. That’s a few billion dollars spent on overcoming the technical problems that fusion still has in front of it. Maybe that’s just more billions wasted. Maybe that brass ring is a really chimera and we aren’t any closer than we were before. Maybe commercially available fusion power just can’t overcome the obstacles.

Or maybe, we are on the verge of the next great step in societal development, today’s equivalent of the invention of the horseless carriage or the cell phone. The horseless carriage had its detractors as well, people that believed that we would never travel faster or farther than a horse could take us.

We have to find out for sure, don’t we?

Maybe this time we really are only twenty years away.