The future of energy isn’t fossil fuels or renewables, it’s nuclear fusion
When I was a boy, barely 10 years old, I was fascinated by science. I devoured particle science and was one of the few kids that understood the difference between fermions and bosons, how the standard model fundamentally worked and what nuclear fission was. But I was particularly intrigued by nuclear fusion. Together with O’Neil habitats and antimatter propulsion, it was one of the big promising technologies that I would see at work in my lifetime. This was 40 years ago. I was born in the year of the first moon landing and I am a techno freak but I have given up dreaming of bountiful, cheap fusion energy. We have fission now and it can be done safely contrary to what many like to believe. We have methane as a great carrier medium. Fusion is still a dream, not a solution to anything. Nothing we should build our future upon.
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that the climate doesn’t matter. That we’re completely ignoring the connection between carbon dioxide, the Earth’s atmosphere, the greenhouse effect, global temperatures, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise.
