by Lawrence Kadish

The clean energy breakthrough everyone has been wishing for finally is here! It may not be quite ready for prime time, but a quiet nuclear-fusion energy race is underway and cannot come soon enough.

The problem is that China seems to be winning it, not the United States or the West.

It is nuclear fusion — making atoms collide, rather than splitting them, or fission — when two atoms are forced to combine into one new atom at extremely hot temperatures. “In order for fusion to occur on the very hot gas — or plasma,” notes euro-fusion.org, “the plasma must be heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Celsius [320 million degrees F]. ” The sun does it without a container — their combined new weight comes to less than each atom had separately.

This differential becomes a burst of energy that leaves no nuclear residue while functioning as if one had in one’s car a gallon of gas which could run it for 20 years. Fusion energy produced four times the power of fission energy, and when harnessed could be used as fuel for expeditions into outer space. Soon we shall presumably be able to say goodbye to expensive, combustible, warm-weather-only and not-very-far lithium batteries, and instead travel unpollutingly along on tiny bundles of captured energy.

The good news is that nuclear fusion, which is produced through nuclear reactors, tokamaks, leaves absolutely no residue.

Readmore…