Ambient office = 77 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 105 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 96 nanosieverts per hour

     Last week, the nuclear fusion startup Helion announced that it has raised five hundred million dollars. They said that they have developed new technologies that may make commercial nuclear fusion viable. While it is too early to know if Helion claims are accurate, there are so many fusion projects and breakthroughs recently that the Helion claim cannot be dismissed. The possibility of carbon-free energy generation raises an important question. How much would the world change if a cheap and clean energy source were readily available.
     The arrival of cheap fusion energy will trigger other changes. While nuclear fusion may not be able to be used to power an airplane, it could be used to generate cheap hydrogen fuel which could do things that fusion power cannot. A chain reaction would occur that spread cheap and clean energy across the economy.
     With the arrival of cheap fusion power, it will be easier to get anywhere much more quickly. Many remote places would be transformed. Hopefully many of the changes would be positive. A probable second-order effect would be that countries with good infrastructure planning would receive a significant relative gain over countries without good planning.
     Desalinating water would be cheap and easy. This would transform and terraform many landscapes. Deserts would bloom but there will be an environmental debate about how many deserts should be retained. It might be possible to manipulate temperatures outdoors which could partially offset the impact of climate change.
     Wages should rise significantly. More goods and services should be available. However, the demand for labor would rise substantially. On the other hand, automation of many jobs would accelerate. Robots will proliferate which will trigger more second and third order effects.
     Cheap abundant energy will also make supercomputing more available, and the cryptocurrency industry will be more convenient. Nanotechnology will get a major boost.
     With an increase in the relative plenty of material goods, people may invest more resources in seeking status. Membership in exclusive clubs will likely be more expensive.
     Limiting climate change may not be as simple as it might first seem. Nuclear fusion can replace all the fossil fuel power plants but there are secondary consequences that should be considered. As water desalinization becomes cheaper and easier, irrigation will become cheaper. Many areas would become more verdant which could lead to more cattle being raised and eaten. The methane released by more cows would contribute to climate change. On the other hand, cheap abundant energy would make protective technologies cheaper and more ubiquitous which could offset the methane problem.
     In a would with cheap zero carbon energy, the stakes would be greater for a large group of decisions. If we are unable to clear the air of pollution, the increase of radical change would spawn a whole host of new problems. One of these would be more methane emissions. The race between the destructive and restorative powers of technology would become much more consequential.
     In the short run, fossil fuel-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia would be the losers. Over the long term, many commodity producing nations would also have reason to worry. China might find it easier to grow more crops and would stop buying from food exporting countries. Areas stricken by drought with deserts and water problems but with decent institution could be major winners.
     As is so often the case with any new technology, the challenges are real but there is enormous potential benefit.

Ambient office = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 72 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumber from Central Market = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 62 nanosieverts per hour

     Professor Ian Chapman heads the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). He is also the head of Britain’s nuclear fusion program. He says that the U.K. needs to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to green technologies in order to tackle global warming. He told an interviewer that he believes that nuclear fusion is viable but society “does not have its priorities right” when it comes to spending on green technologies.
     Britain is one of the leading countries in global nuclear fusion research. The UKAEA’s campus in Oxfordshire is hosting several projects with the goal of unlocking the enormous potential of nuclear fusion. Proponents of nuclear fusion argue that it will be much safer than conventional nuclear fission in producing great power with little attendant radiation.
      It is expected that Britain will decide where to site their first functioning prototype fusion power plant in the near future. The prototype is due to be operational by the 2040s with 300 million dollars of public funding. ITER is a twenty-seven-billion-dollar multinational fusion project in France. It is expected to begin operations in 2025.
      Professor Chapman said that he feels that a flood of private investment into fusion projects is a “really important sign” that energy businesses increasing believe that commercial fusion will become a reality. General Fusion is a Canadian company that recently announced plans to construct a four hundred million dollar demonstration plant on the UKAEA’s campus in Culham, near Abingdon.
     Speaking ahead of a forum on fusion power at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Chapman warned that global leaders have not yet fully grasped the urgency and importance of fulling funding existing and emerging technologies including fusion, carbon capture and next generation solar power to provide a full portfolio of green energy sources.
     Chapman also said that “There are all sorts of things that we should be investing hundreds of billions into and we’re not. Globally, we are spending hundreds of billions this year on extracting fossil fuels. As a [global] society, we don’t have our priorities in the right place. We should realize that this is an existential problem and deal with it in the same way that we have approached Covid-19, where we have invested heavily in the technology that it going to get us out of the crisis. If we treated climate change in the same way, of course we would deal with it quicker.”
     In spite of private sector investment in commercial fusion companies of one and three quarters billion dollars in recent years, many analysts remain skeptical that fusion technology will become a commercial reality any time soon. Senior industry figures say that hope of commercial fusion production by the 2030s are over optimistic and that the 2060s or 2070s are a more realistic target.
      ITER will be fully operational by 2035. It is designed to provide definitive proof of fusion’s potential by taking an input of fifty megawatts and turning it into an output of five hundred megawatts.
      Chapman argues that fusion power has the potential to replace gas and coal as the source of “base load” continuous energy production to supplement weather-dependent sources of green power. Britain has a huge opportunity to become a global exporter of fusion technology. He said that the U.K. government understands the potential of nuclear fusion and was taking progressive action. This includes investment and recent publication of proposals for a regulatory regime that would be separate from the strictures of the requirements placed on conventional nuclear power.
     The U.K.’s prototype fusion plant is due to open during the 2040s. It is known as STEP and it offers the possibility of a more compact fusion reactor which will probably be much cheaper than supersized fusion reactors such as ITER.
     Chapman said, “I completely believe that we will make fusion work – I believe in the ingenuity of people to solve the problems we face.”

Ambient office = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 71 nanosieverts per hour

Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
     Grid-enhancement technologies will also be important for maintaining a reliable electric system as more people switch to electric vehicles and electric heating according to Karen Wayland who is the CEO of the GridWise alliance. She also said that “It’s a historic investment in grid upgrades to enhance resilience, reliability and security, and it’s going to help transform the grid into one that can accommodate these low-carbon goals.”
     State regulators and energy offices will also be compelled to consider setting up new programs to advance demand response and electrical vehicle deployment. This could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity and transportation sectors.
     Jennifer Granholm is the Secretary of Energy. Yesterday, she was in Delaware to announce that the DoE has upgraded a million U.S. homes with energy efficiency improvements via the Home Performance with Energy Star program. She said that since 2001, that program “has helped American homeowners and renters save $7.7 billion on their energy bills and cut carbon emissions equivalent to a year’s worth of 11 coal-fired power plants.”
     One of the major elements of the infrastructure bill is a focus on emerging technologies. Tens of billions of dollars in new funds will be added to the DoE’s coffers. Much of this money is destined to help young companies scales up everything from long-duration storage and hydrogen to carbon capture, direct air capture, and small modular nuclear. New offices will open inside the DoE to carry other that missions. These new offices include an Office of Clean Energy Demonstration which will receive about twenty-one billion dollars to oversee expensive new pilot projects. DoE has a record of stewarding along new technology. Tesla Inc is the electric vehicle colossus valued at over one thousand dollars per share. It can trace its origins to a four hundred and sixty-five million government loan in 2010. Tesla used this money to open its first assembly plant in Fremont, California. Now the infrastructure bill is effectively tasking the department with repeating that success story many times over. It is responding in part to requests from innovation advocated and DoE officials, who have argued that the feds need to do far more to bring emerging technologies to the wider market.
     Those arguments have been supported by some evidence which shows that DoE’s lab-stage work on clean energy often does not translate into real-world breakthroughs. A study published last year showed that startups backed by the DoE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy were twice as likely as their competitors to receive a patent but no better are reaching commercialization.
      The Tesla success story has its inverse. The Solyndra solar manufacturing company got a five hundred and thirty five million dollar loan guarantee from the same DoE branch known as the Loan Program Office (LPO). Conservatives attached the Obama administration for squandering funds on what they considered to be vanity clean energy projects. Today that LPO is profitable thanks to the broader success of its portfolio. The Solyndra fiasco slowed the LPO’s work to a near standstill. This was especially true under the Trump administration. It made awards to only one venture which was the Plant Vogtle nuclear project in Georgia.
      Innovation advocates have found a willing ear in the Biden administration and also several Senate Republicans. However, it remains to be seen how their ideas will play out through the lens of the country’s contentious politics.
     Much of the technology that will get the attention of the DoE such as hydrogen and carbon capture is unpopular with environmental justice advocates. They have cried foul at the plans of the administration to deploy the tech in front-line communities. That may trigger debates in the Democratic Party over the department’s big-ticket energy demonstrations.
     Christopher Davis is the senior advisor to the DoE Secretary. During a media call about the bill yesterday, he said, “Summing up the idea of the demonstrations, to reach our net-zero goal we have to replicate these huge [projects] dozens and hundreds of times across the country. Someone has to build the first ones, to show that it can be done.”