Nuclear Fusion-Energy Source of the future?

With this being the anniversary of the nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan, there has been a lot of talk about the future of nuclear energy. This made me think about nuclear fusion about which I have not heard nor seen anything in the popular press.

About ten years ago I visited Japan’s nuclear fusion facility. There were large power lines going into and out of the facility. I was told by my hosts that the surrounding villages were actually powered by electricity produced with nuclear fusion. The only problem was that more power was consumed than created. At that time scientists there were projecting that 2016 would be a pivotal year where the amount of energy produced would start becoming larger than the energy consumed in the process.

Following is a little background on nuclear fusion from a layman’s perspective. The current atomic energy and the atomic bomb for that matter, rely on fission, which essentially splits an atom of one material into two separate materials of a slightly smaller combined mass. The mass that is lost is converted into energy. As the meltdown at Fukushima demonstrated, fission is a risky process with heavy costs in obtaining, refining, containing and disposing of the source material. In fusion, on the other hand, two separate materials are combined at an atomic level with the resulting material also having a little less mass. The lost mass, as in the case of fission, is converted to energy. Fusion (the hydrogen bomb relied on fusion instead of fission) has many advantages over fission. First of all, the fuel used is seawater. Though there is still radiation involved, the ½ life of the waste material is very short compared to that in the current atomic energy process and therefore the containment and disposal become much less of a problem.

At the time I visited the Japanese facility, there were also fusion reactors being refined in a number of facilities around the world. Before I retired, our company made a component that went into an instrument that measured temperature gradients in the reactors. Beside Japan we made components for Princeton University and general Atomic here in the US, Hydro Quebec in Canada, the Max Plank Institute in Germany and the French atomic energy organization. I had an opportunity to interaction with scientist involved, though not often and not on a deep technical level and had formed the impression that nuclear fusion, as a source of energy, had long transitioned from the feasibility stage to an engineering stage. I believe engineering problems are solvable. The question comes down to resources and time. In looking toward renewable energy in the future, our government is adequately funding this development.

Santorum's Family Values

Last week I heard Rick Santorum, the GOP Presidential Candidate, talk about the importance of family to the well-being of our society. I agree with much of his commentary, though I would not put the value of family in the context of religious morality.

In his discussion he mentioned statistics supporting family structure indicating the difference in poverty rates and incarceration rates of two parent households versus single parent ones. The statistic that jumped out at me was one that indicated that 79% of individuals behind bars come from single parent households. A couple of years ago I saw a PBS program that highlighted kindergarten students in a Harlem school and then showed the same students as young adults. The thing that struck me was that, though they were very poor, the students that came from two parent homes on the whole did about as well as the general society, most going on to college, some post high school education or working in “good” jobs. Few of the kids from single-family homes continued education past high school with some dropping out and a number winding up in jail. This story, though only one “data point” supports Santorum’s argument for the value of a family.

Last decade there was a controversial book written, I recall neither the name of the author or the exact title but the thing that made the book controversial is that the author looked at IQ as a function of race, braking it up into people of African, Asian and European roots. He concluded that though they all fell into “normal distributions”, the peaks of African descendants was shifted to lower and Asian to higher levels. As a sidebar he also found that the IQ of the prison population was at the lowest end of any of the distributions and not accounted for by the fact that there is a higher percentage of African descendants in prisons. Intuitively this made sense to me. People who wind up in jail for the most part have either not figured out the risks of committing a crime or have not figured out how not to get caught.

Since Santorum’s statistics show that the bulk of prisoners come from single-family homes and the above author that the bulk of prisoners have low IQs, should one conclude that people from single-family homes have lower IQs? That may be the case but there may be factors other than family structure to consider. Tabor Mata, a Canadian physician who wrote several books on addiction and childhood development, postulates (I wrote about this in an earlier post on my blog “Society’s Impact on Good Parenting) that when we humans enter the world, our brains are not yet physiologically fully developed and need another year or two to finish this development. To do so properly, infants need a stress free nurturing environment. In the last couple of decades there has been a stagnation of wages and increasing costs for lodging and food. This situation puts many households under a lot of stress, I would think particularly single families. If Dr. Meta is right, this “stress” in the household interferes with proper childhood development and it is the reduction of stress with two people sharing the parenting not the esoteric nobility nor religious virtue of family that has a positive affect on our society. I suspect that children raised in a two parent setting where both parents work and struggle to survive, would also suffer and children raised in a stress free single parent environment would do just fine. Government policies have an impact in that they can affect childhood development. For example, the affect of the Welfare Reform of the 90s I believe, though it looked good on paper, was catastrophic for childhood development and we as a society will suffer the consequences. The reform essentially limited the time a mother on welfare could receive benefits, forcing her into the workplace instead of tending to the children.. Another policy issue is the low minimum wage we have in this Country. It does two things. First it can force both parents to work and second, the low wages makes childcare affordable, making it easier for both parents to work. I believe in the long term, the answer is to create an environment where all children can properly develop be it through encouraging two parent households or otherwise. A two parent family is a help but probably is not the only answer. The key is to reduce stress allowing a parent to calmly see a child through the first few formative years.

Santorum also attributed (though I may be stretching things a bit here) a certain nobility to family, church and community with government trying to diminish it. Here Rick and I part company. Though I will admit that in many cases, a family structure can have advantages to a society, there is no evidence that it has any ethical advantages. After all, the slave owners were good family men who I am sure went to church and were upstanding members of their communities. The communities in the South that forced people of color to ride in the back of a bus and drink from separate fountains were made up of good churchgoing families. Following passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, the white congregations that established parish schools to continue segregation were made up of families. These acts were far from noble and no different than what I am sure single individuals at that time and in that place did.

Under Nazi occupation, France’s motto was changed from “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”; to “Work, Family, Country” (I wonder how that motto would play on the Right today in our Country?). I am sure that the Nazi Storm Troopers imprisoning and killing countless Jews came from good German church going families. Stalin, who murdered more than a million of his own people, though an atheist, was a family man. There probably are no stronger family ties than exist within primitive Islamic countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan yet they oppress women. So where was family nobility?

Yesterday Santorum went further, criticized President Obama for wanting to expand attendance at college claiming the President wants to brainwash our children molding them in his own image whereas Rick would want them to be made into the image of their parents. Though I doubt that the President really wants a country full of people like him, he certainly would not want a county peopled with children carrying over the values of the segregationist South. Fortunately most of the families were not fully effective in passing these values onto their children and we as a society are better for it. Unfortunately a few families were successful. Old beliefs need to be challenged and often discarded and replaced by ones that advance the prosperity and quality of our whole society and not just their family, church and community.