Nuclear fusion is not usually subject to ethical scrutiny, since it promises to replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission as the main power source. It is much cleaner and safer. However, there are concerns.
There have been some major advances in the field of nuclear fusion last week. If you don’t know much about the subject, I recommend you watch the video bellow before reading the articles.
The theory behind fusion has been understood for nearly a century, and controlled reactions have been achieved as early as 1950’s. But all those experiments required more energy than they produced, making them useless for power generation. However, this changed recently, when scientists in Germany successfully operated a fusion reactor that they say is able to produce net energy gain. Further, just last week, researchers at MIT made important discoveries about how the hot plasma behaves inside the reactor.
JET fusion reactor. The torus is designed to hold the heated plasma suspended in air, preventing it from touching the walls and thus losing heat.
Source: Flickr, by aglet
Now, to the ethics part. What could possibly be ethically controversial about a power source that does not pollute our atmosphere with carbon and does not produce radioactive materials, that is safe and practically limitless? Well, it’s the fact that it’s not limitless.
Like Dr. Cowley, I worry about the Sun swallowing the Earth when it expands. Another realization that struck me very hard was the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The entropy of the universe is constantly increasing and so even if we get off of our planet in time, there will come a day when all the universe is in thermodynamic equilibrium, at which point no life will be possible. And although these events are billions of years away, they worry me. I don’t understand why. I know there is nothing we can do about them and I hope that, despite our best efforts, I’ll be dead by then.
What we can do something about is the first thing Dr. Cowley talked about, our consumption of natural resources. And what fusion is, is the consumption of Earth’s most precious resource: water. They tell us that there is enough water on Earth to last 30 million years, but obviously, we can’t use all of it. Even if the only thing we care about are our own anthropocentric little selves and let all other life on Earth perish, we can’t use 100%. We probably couldn’t even use 50% and I don’t think we should use any, because the process of fusion is irreversible. As a source of energy, it is completely unrenewable (which even fossil fuels are, to some degree).
I understand, it is the lesser evil, but it is an evil nevertheless. It is a treatment of symptoms rather than the cause, which is simply that we use too much. What we should focus on, is reducing our consumption, which we will eventually have to do anyway, be it now or in 30 million years. We should reduce our consumption so that renewable sources (wind, solar) would suffice. Or better yet, we should all go live in the woods and be merry. 🙂
– Jan
