TIME has arrived for man to stop trying to organise nature to suit his needs and purpose and start paying attention to the needs and purpose of nature, and especially to hear its warnings and to follow them.
Man’s mechanisation and industrialisation has created global warming.
Today he is reaping the harvest of his greedy drive to improve his livelihood at the expense of his habitat.
Tampering with nature, man’s genius gave his kind, and unfortunately all kinds on earth, the atom bomb.
He had learnt to split the atom which gave him nuclear fission.
From there it was a short race to arrive at nuclear fusion, the power base of the sun and all stars.
China recently announced it has created temperatures in a reactor that are five times hotter than the sun in an effort to unlock and harness the power of nuclear fusion to provide, as it claims, “near limitless clean energy for humankind”.
Live Science in January 2022 quoted the Chinese State owned Xinhua News Agency as reporting that China’s US$1 trillion (about K4 trillion) ‘artificial sun’ fusion reactor has created temperatures at 158 million degrees celcius which makes it five times hotter than the sun.
China is not the first to lay claim to the feat.
France earned that honour in 2003.
The record and scientific data from these crucial experiments are a major boost for ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor).
ITER is a fusion research mega-project supported by seven members – China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA — based in the south of France, to further demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.
Mankind, in his endless efforts to tamper with nature to suit his needs, began this particular undertaking in 1958 when a Soviet scientist called Nathan Yavlinnsky designed the first tokamak, a doughnut shaped coiling loop in which plasma (one of the four stages of matter) was trapped inside magnets and cooked at very high temperatures.
By this process mankind hopes to harness the raw energy of nuclear fusion, the power by which stars burn, and unlock near limitless clean energy.
Energy by nuclear fusion is one of mankind’s long standing quests because it promises to be low carbon. Scientists tell us it would be safer than how nuclear energy is now produced and with an efficiency that is near perfect.
They further tell us that a kg of fusion fuel contains about 10 million times as much energy as a kg of coal, oil or gas.
Scientists cook deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of hydrogen, to temperatures many times hotter than the centre of the sun to create plasma. This is held in place using superconducting electromagnets as it spins around, fuses and releases tremendous energy as heat.
Called the EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) the Chinese ‘artificial sun’ has set a new world record after superheating a loop of plasma to a temperature of 158 million degrees Fahrenheit (70 million degrees Celsius) for 1,056 seconds or 17 minutes, according to Xinhua.
If the sun, burning at just 27 million degrees can melt iron and send superheated energy and light millions of klometers across the solar system, what would something burning at five time that heat do were it to escape its Tokamak harness?
The sun’s light reaches earth in eight minutes so China’s artificial sun which burnt for 17 minutes could, were it to escape, reach beyond the sun, turning earth to melted dust and helium in the process.
Scientists would of course have put in place firewalls and safety mechanisms but if the process going on inside tokamaks burn plasma, the earth is basically all plasma, so it just requires sufficient heat and energy for the earth to become a star — heat and energy such as that now being produced inside tokamaks would evaporate all we know. Let such heat as produced inside the tokmas escape and the earth could become an instantaneous nuclear fusion. Every form of life , of course, would be obliterated in the first nanoseconds.
The atomic bomb was created when atomic fission occurred. The powers of that we found out to our eternal shame and dismay when 200,000 lives were vaporized in seconds when the bomb called ‘big boy’ was detonated above the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1942.
Under Switzerland along a 27 kilometres tunnel international scientists are shooting particles towards each other at near light speed to clash to smithereens and in the process, it is hoped, would be found the ‘god’ particle.
Man is experimenting with powers many times those of the sun.
While the original and science based incentive is to find that elusive source of limitless source of power at very little environmental cost, the military minds who dominate political thinking will take over when the product is finished.
There will be found military uses for nuclear fusion as was found military purposes for the steam engine, nuclear fission and the internet.
Of that you can be absolutely certain.
Nuclear fusion today brings the world one more step closer to Armageddon.
Mercifully it will be over in a flash of light.
