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green energy
The Green Energy Revolution's Colonization of Africa
If capitalist interests continue to drive this crucial transition, which is all too likely, while global energy consumption isn’t scaled back radically, the amount of critical minerals needed to power the global future remains unfathomable.
Oct 12, 2024
Considered Angola’s crown jewel by many, Lobito is a colorful port city on the country’s scenic Atlantic coast where a nearly five-kilometer strip of land creates a natural harbor. Its white sand beaches, vibrant blue waters, and mild tropical climate have made Lobito a tourist destination in recent years. Yet under its shiny new facade is a history fraught with colonial violence and exploitation.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to lay claim to Angola in the late sixteenth century. For nearly four centuries, they didn’t relent until a bloody, 27-year civil war with anticolonial guerillas (aided by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) and bolstered by a leftist coup in distant Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, overthrew that colonial regime in 1974.
Lobito’s port was the economic heart of Portugal’s reign in Angola, along with the meandering 1,866-kilometer Benguela Railway, which first became operational in the early 1900s. For much of the twentieth century, Lobito was the hub for exporting to Europe agricultural goods and metals mined in Africa’s Copperbelt. Today, the Copperbelt remains a resource-rich region encompassing much of the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Zambia.
Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn that, half a century after Portugal’s colonial control of Angola ended, neocolonialism is now sinking its hooks into Lobito. Its port and the Benguela Railway, which travels along what’s known as the Lobito Corridor, have become a key nucleus of China’s and the Western world’s efforts to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in our hot new world. If capitalist interests continue to drive this crucial transition, which is all too likely, while global energy consumption isn’t scaled back radically, the amount of critical minerals needed to power the global future remains unfathomable. The World Economic Forum estimates that three billion tons of metals will be required. The International Energy Forum estimates that to meet the global goals of radically reducing carbon emissions, we’ll also need between 35 and 194 massive copper mines by 2050.
It should come as no surprise that most of the minerals from copper to cobalt needed for that transition’s machinery (including electric batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels) are located in Latin America and Africa. Worse yet, more than half (54%) of the critical minerals needed are on or near Indigenous lands, which means the most vulnerable populations in the world are at the most significant risk of being impacted in a deeply negative fashion by future mining and related operations.
Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.
When you want to understand what the future holds for a country in the “developing” world, as economists still like to call such regions, look no further than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “With growing demand, proceeds from critical minerals are poised to rise significantly over the next two decades,” reports the IMF. “Global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium — are estimated to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to reap over 10 percent of these accumulated revenues, which could correspond to an increase in the region’s GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050.”
Sub-Saharan Africa alone is believed to contain 30% of the world’s total critical mineral reserves. It’s estimated that the Congo is responsible for 70% of global cobalt output and approximately 50% of the globe’s reserves. In fact, the demand for cobalt, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries, is rapidly increasing because of its use in everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. As for copper, Africa has two of the world’s top producers, with Zambia accounting for 70% of the continent’s output. “This transition,” adds the IMF, “if managed properly, has the potential to transform the region.” And, of course, it won’t be pretty.
While such critical minerals might be mined in rural areas of the Congo and Zambia, they must reach the international marketplace to become profitable, which makes Angola and the Lobito Corridor key to Africa’s booming mining industry.
In 2024, China committed $4.5 billion to African lithium mines alone and another $7 billion to investments in copper and cobalt mining infrastructure. In the Congo, for example, China controls 70% of the mining sector.
Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.
Zambia’s Copper Colonialism
In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India, Secretary of State Antony Blinken quietly signed an agreement with Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the European Union to launch the Lobito Corridor project. There wasn’t much fanfare or news coverage, but the United States had made a significant move. Almost 50 years after Portugal was forced out of Angola, the West was back, offering a $4 billion commitment and assessing the need to update the infrastructure first built by European colonizers. With a growing need for critical minerals, Western countries are now setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures.
“We meet at a historic moment,” President Joe Biden said as he welcomed Angolan President João Lourenço to Washington last year. Biden then called the Lobito project the “biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever” and affirmed the West’s interest in what the region might have to offer in the future. “America,” he added, “is all in on Africa… We’re all in with you and Angola.”
BothAfrica and the U.S., Biden was careful to imply, would reap the benefits of such a coalition. Of course, that’s precisely the kind of rhetoric we can expect when Western (or Chinese) interests are intent on acquiring the resources of the Global South. If this were about oil or coal, questions and concerns would undoubtedly be raised regarding America’s regional intentions. Yet, with the fight against climate change providing cover, few are considering the geopolitical ramifications of such a position — and even fewer acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent.
In his book Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara exposes the bloody conditions cobalt miners in the Congo endure, many of them children laboring against their will for days on end, with little sleep and under excruciatingly abusive conditions. The dreadful story is much the same in Zambia, where copper exports account for more than 70% of the country’s total export revenue. A devastating 126-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2011 exposed the wretchedness inside Zambia’s Chinese-owned mines: 18-hour work days, unsafe working environments, rampant anti-union activities, and fatal workplace accidents. There is little reason to believe it’s much different in the more recent Western-owned operations.
“Friends tell you that there’s a danger as they’re coming out of shift,” a miner who was injured while working for a Chinese company told HRW. “You’ll be fired if you refuse, they threaten this all the time… The main accidents are from rock falls, but you also have electrical shocks, people hit by mining trucks underground, people falling from platforms that aren’t stable… In my accident, I was in a loading box. The mine captain… didn’t put a platform. So when we were working, a rock fell down and hit my arm. It broke to the extent that the bone was coming out of the arm.”
An explosion at one mine killed 51 workers in 2005 and things have only devolved since then. Ten workers died in 2018 at an illegal copper extraction site. In 2019, three mineworkers were burned to death in an underground shaft fire and a landslide at an open-pit copper mine in Zambia killed more than 30 miners in 2023. Despite such horrors, there’s a rush to extract ever more copper in Zambia. As of 2022, five gigantic open-pit copper mines were operating in the country, and eight more underground mines were in production, many of which are to be further expanded in the years ahead. With new U.S.-backed mines in the works, Washington believes the Lobito Corridor may prove to be the missing link needed to ensure Zambian copper will end up in green energy goods consumed in the West.
AI Mining for AI Energy
The office of KoBold Metals in quaint downtown Berkeley, California, is about as far away from Zambia’s dirty mines as you can get. Yet, at KoBold’s nondescript headquarters, which sits above a row of trendy bars and restaurants, a team of tech entrepreneurs diligently work to locate the next big mine operation in Zambia using proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, KoBold bills itself as a green Silicon Valley machine, committed to the world’s green energy transition (while turning a nice profit).
It is in KoBold’s interest, of course, to secure the energy deposits of the future because it will take an immense amount of energy to support their artificially intelligent world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the near future, electricity usage by AI data centers will increase significantly. As of 2022, such data centers were already utilizing 460 terawatt hours (TWh) but are on pace to increase to 1,050 TWh by the middle of the decade. To put that in perspective, Europe’s total energy consumption in 2023 was around 2,700 TWh.
“Anyone who’s in the renewable space in the western world… is looking for copper and cobalt, which are fundamental to making electric vehicles,” Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold in Zambia, explained to the Financial Times in 2024. “That is going to come from this part of the world and the shortest route to take them out is Lobito.”
Makayi wasn’t beating around the bush. The critical minerals in KoBold mines won’t end up in the possession of Zambia or any other African country. They are bound for Western consumers alone. KoBold’s CEO Kurt House is also honest about his intentions: “I don’t need to be reminded again that I’m a capitalist,” he’s been known to quip.
In July 2024, House rang his company’s investors with great news: KoBold had just hit the jackpot in Zambia. Its novel AI tech had located the largest copper find in more than a decade. Once running, it could produce upwards of 300,000 tons of copper annually — or, in the language investors understand, the cash will soon flow. As of late summer 2024, one ton of copper on the international market cost more than $9,600. Of course, KoBold has gone all in, spending $2.3 billion to get the Zambian mine operable by 2030. Surely, KoBold’s investors were excited by the prospect, but not everyone was as thrilled as them.
“The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia,” says Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa. “The link between resource and benefit is severed.”
Not only has Zambia relinquished the benefits of such mineral exploitation, but — consider it a guarantee — its people will be left to suffer the local mess that will result.
The Poisoned River
Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) is today the largest ore producer in Zambia, ripping out a combined two million tons of copper a year. It’s one of the nation’s largest employers, with a brutally long record of worker and environmental abuses. KCM runs Zambia’s largest open-pit mine, which stretches for seven miles. In 2019, the British-based Vedanta Resources acquired an 80% stake in KCM by covering $250 million of that company’s debt. Vedanta has deep pockets and is run by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, affectionately known in the mining world as “the Metal King.”
One thing should be taken for granted: You don’t become the Metal King without leaving entrails of toxic waste on your coattails. In India, Agarwal’s alumina mines have polluted the lands of the Indigenous Kondh tribes in Orissa Province. In Zambia, his copper mines have wrecked farmlands and waterways that once supplied fish and drinking water to thousands of villagers.
The Kafue River runs for more than 1,500 kilometers, making it Zambia’s longest river and now probably its most polluted as well. Going north to south, its waters flow through the Copperbelt, carrying with them cadmium, lead, and mercury from KCM’s mine. In 2019, thousands of Zambian villagers sued Vedanta, claiming its subsidiary KCM had poisoned the Kafue River and caused insurmountable damage to their lands.
The British Supreme Court then found Vedanta liable, and the company was forced to pay an undisclosed settlement, likely in the millions of dollars. Such a landmark victory for those Zambian villagers couldn’t have happened without the work of Chilekwa Mumba, who organized communities and convinced an international law firm to take up the case. Mumba grew up in the Chingola region of Zambia, where his father worked in the mines.
“[T]here was some environmental degradation going on as a result of the mining activities. As we found, there were times when the acid levels of water was so high,” explained Mumba, the 2023 African recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. “So there were very specific complaints about stomach issues from children. Children just really wander around the villages and if they are thirsty, they don’t think about what’s happening, they’ll just get a cup and take their drink of water from the river. That’s how they live. So they’ll usually get diseases. It’s hard to quantify, but clearly the impact was there.”
Sadly enough, though, despite that important legal victory, little has changed in Zambia, where environmental regulations remain weak and nearly impossible to enforce, which leaves mining companies like KCM to regulate themselves. A 2024 Zambian legislative bill seeks to create a regulatory body to oversee mining operations, but the industry has pushed back, making it unclear if it will ever be signed into law. Even if the law does pass, it may have little real-world impact on mining practices there.
The warming climate, at least to the billionaire mine owners and their Western accomplices, will remain an afterthought, as well as a justification to exploit more of Africa’s critical minerals. Consider it a new type of colonialism, this time with a green capitalist veneer. There are just too many AI programs to run, too many tech gadgets to manufacture, and too much money to be made.
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'Wowza': Economy Added 254,000 Jobs Under Biden-Harris in September
"This labor market," said one economist, "is the result of policy choices that prioritized full employment—as it turns out putting people first, works."
Oct 04, 2024
Friday's job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics offered a "better than expected" picture of job growth as federal unemployment hit 4.1% and more than a quarter-million people were added to the payroll last month alone.
In what ABC Newsnoted was "one of the last major pieces of economic data before the presidential election," the jobs report offered an indication of economic strength—a possible boon to outgoing President Joe Biden's legacy and a political advantage to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of November 5.
"U.S. hiring surged in September," the news outlet reported, "blowing past economist expectations and rebuking concern about weakness in the labor market."
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the new data Friday morning by pointing out that "more jobs have been created during the Biden-Harris presidency than during any single presidential term in history."
Donald Trump "doesn't often tell the truth, but he was right about this," added Reich, who quoted the GOP presidential candidate in 2004 admitting that "the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans."
More jobs have been created during the Biden-Harris presidency than during any single presidential term in history.
Trump doesn't often tell the truth, but he was right about this:
"The economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans." — Donald Trump in 2004 pic.twitter.com/32XQnqbbb1
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) October 4, 2024
"Wowza," said economist Justin Wolfers, a professor at the University of Michigan and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, in response to Friday's report.
Mentioning how payrolls grew by over 254,000 in September—"well above expectations"—and that large upward revisions were made to the August and July payroll numbers, Wolfers said the overall picture shows an "economic expansion that is motoring along."
September jobs report: US economy adds 254,000 jobs vs. 150,000 expected pic.twitter.com/fUZvzx8tuK
— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) October 4, 2024
"It was 'wow' across the board, much stronger than expected," Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist at Charles Schwab, toldCNBC. "The bottom line is it was a very good report. You get upward revisions and it tells you the job market continues to be healthy, and that means the economy is healthy."
Pointing to a recent analysis by her colleague Josh Bevins, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Hilary Wething on Friday credited the strong performance represented by the new jobs numbers as the result of specific policies by the administration.
"You might think we just magically stumbled upon a consistently strong labor market—but no, this labor market is the result of policy choices that prioritized full employment—as it turns out putting people first, works," said Wething.
Elise Gould, a senior economist at EPI, also championed the "strong" figures:
In a blog post on Thursday, ahead of Friday's report—Gould detailed the strength of the labor market, despite the real pain that many workers and families still feel in their day to day lives:
It is indisputable that the U.S. labor market is strong. The share of the population ages 25–54 with a job is at a 23-year high, median household incomes rose 4.0% last year, and real wage growth over the last four years has been broad-based and strong. The economy has not only regained the nearly 22 million jobs lost in the pandemic recession, but also added another 6.5 million.
Are some folks still having a hard time? Absolutely. Even when the unemployment rate is low, there are still sidelined workers, and it remains difficult for many families to make ends meet on wages that are still too low. Unfortunately, that's a long-term phenomenon stemming from a too-stingy U.S. welfare state, rising inequality, and the legacy of anemic wage growth during past economic recoveries. But when comparing the labor market with four years ago (during the pandemic recession) or even before the pandemic began, the answer is clear: More workers have jobs and wages are beating inflation by solid margins.
With the Federal Reserve easing interest rates, in part based based on the strength of the hiring trends alongside lower inflation, Friday's jobs report was welcomed as a show of strength for progressives who have argued since the Covid-19 pandemic that pro-worker policies—as opposed to endless fealty to the demands of corporate powers and Wall Street—alongside public investments can work together to create strong economic foundations for the nation.
"Today's strong jobs report confirms once again that we never had to throw millions of people out of work to tame inflation," said Kitty Richards, a senior fellow with the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative.
"Thanks to big investments in [pandemic] relief, manufacturing, and green energy, inflation is low, and the economy is still delivering for workers," Richards said. "The pundits who said we couldn't have low unemployment, growing wages, and stable prices at the same time have been proven wrong."
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Nuclear Fusion Could Save Us! But There's a Catch: It Won't
The promising energy source is not a silver bullet for the climate crisis and has dangers all its own.
Jan 26, 2023
I awoke on December 13th to news about what could be the most significant scientific breakthrough since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first Covid vaccine for emergency use two years ago. This time, however, the achievement had nothing to do with that ongoing public health crisis. Instead, as the New York Times and CNN alerted me that morning, at stake was a new technology that could potentially solve the worst dilemma humanity faces: climate change and the desperate overheating of our planet. Net-energy-gain fusion, a long-sought-after panacea for all that’s wrong with traditional nuclear-fission energy (read: accidents, radioactive waste), had finally been achieved at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” exclaimed White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar.
The New York Times was quick to follow Prabhakar’s lead, boasting that fusion is an “energy source devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gasses caused by the burning of fossil fuels.” Even Fox News, not exactly at the top of anyone’s list of places focused on climate change, jumped on the bandwagon, declaring fusion “a technology that has the potential to accelerate the planet’s shift away from fossil fuels and produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy.”
Sadly, fusion won’t save the Arctic from melting, but if we don’t put a stop to it, that breakthrough technology could someday melt us all.
All in all, the reviews for fusion were positively glowing and it seemed to make instant sense. After all, what could possibly be wrong with something that might end our reliance on fossil fuels, even as it reduced the risks posed by our aging nuclear industry? The message, repeated again and again in the days that followed: this was a genuine global-warming game-changer.
After all, in the fusion process, no atoms have to be split to create heat. Gigantic lasers are used, not uranium, so there’s no toxic mining involved, nor do thousands of gallons of cold water have to be pumped in to cool overheated reactors, nor will there be radioactive waste byproducts lasting hundreds of thousands of years. And not a risk of a nuclear meltdown in sight! Fusion, so the cheery news went, is safe, effective, and efficient!
Or is it?
The Big Catch
On a very basic level, fusion is the stuff of stars. Within the Earth’s sun, hydrogen combines with helium to create heat in the form of sunlight. Inside the walls of the Livermore Lab, this natural process was imitated by blasting 192 gigantic lasers into a tube the size of a baby’s toe. Inside that cylinder sat a “hydrogen-encased diamond.” When the laser shot through the small hole, it destroyed that diamond quicker than the blink of an eye. In doing so, it created a bunch of invisible x-rays that compressed a small pellet of deuterium and tritium, which scientists refer to as “heavy hydrogen.”
“In a brief moment lasting less than 100 trillionths of a second, 2.05 megajoules of energy — roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT — bombarded the hydrogen pellet,”explainedNew York Times reporter Kenneth Chang. “Out flowed a flood of neutron particles — the product of fusion — which carried about 3 megajoules of energy, a factor of 1.5 in energy gain.”
As with so many breakthroughs, there was a catch. First, 3 megajoules isn’t much energy. After all, it takes 360,000 megajoules to create 300 hours of light from a single 100-watt light bulb. So, Livermore’s fusion development isn’t going to electrify a single home, let alone a million homes, anytime soon. And there was another nagging issue with this little fusion creation as well: it took 300 megajoules to power up those 192 lasers. Simply put, at the moment, they require 100 times more energy to charge than the energy they ended up producing.
“The reality is that fusion energy will not be viable at scale anytime within the next decade, a time frame over which carbon emissions must be reduced by 50% to avoid catastrophic warming of more than 1.5°C,”says climate expert Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania. “That task will only be achievable through the scaling up of existing clean energy — renewable sources such as wind and solar — along with energy storage capability and efficiency and conservation measures.”
Tritium Trials and Tribulations
The secretive and heavily secured National Ignition Facility where that test took place is the size of a sprawling sports arena. It could, in fact, hold three football fields. Which makes me wonder: how much space would be needed to do fusion on a commercial scale? No good answer is yet available. Then there’s the trouble with that isotope tritium needed to help along the fusion reaction. It’s not easy to come by and costs about as much as diamonds, around $30,000 per gram. Right now, even some of the bigwigs at the Department of Defense are worried that we’re running out of usable tritium.
“Fusion advocates often boast that the fuel for their reactors will be cheap and plentiful. That is certainly true for deuterium,”writes Daniel Clery in Science. “Roughly one in every 5,000 hydrogen atoms in the oceans is deuterium, and it sells for about $13 per gram. But tritium, with a half-life of 12.3 years, exists naturally only in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere, the product of cosmic ray bombardment.”
Fusion boosters brush this unwelcome fact aside, pointing out that “tritium breeding” — a process in which tritium is endlessly produced in a loop-like fashion — is entirely possible in a fully operating fusion reactor. In theory, this may seem plausible, but you need a bunch of tritium to jumpstart the initial chain reaction and doubt abounds that there’s enough of it out there to begin with. On top of that, the reactors themselves will have to be lined with a lot of lithium, itself an expensive chemical element at $71 a kilogram (copper, by contrast, is around $9.44 a kilogram), to allow the process to work correctly.
Then there’s also a commonly repeated misstatement that fusion doesn’t create significant radioactive waste, a haunting reality for the world’s current fleet of nuclear plants. True, plutonium, which can be used as fuel in atomic weapons, isn’t a natural byproduct of fusion, but tritium is the radioactive form of hydrogen. Its little isotopes are great at permeating metals and finding ways to escape tight enclosures. Obviously, this will pose a significant problem for those who want to continuously breed tritium in a fusion reactor. It also presents a concern for people worried about radioactivity making its way out of such facilities and into the environment.
“Cancer is the main risk from humans ingesting tritium. When tritium decays it spits out a low-energy electron (roughly 18,000 electron volts) that escapes and slams into DNA, a ribosome, or some other biologically important molecule,” David Biello explains in Scientific American. “And, unlike other radionuclides, tritium is usually part of water, so it ends up in all parts of the body and therefore can, in theory, promote any kind of cancer. But that also helps reduce the risk: any tritiated water is typically excreted in less than a month.”
If that sounds problematic, that’s because it is. This country’s above-ground atomic bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s was responsible for most of the man-made tritium that’s lingering in the environment. And it will be at least 2046, 84 years after the last American atmospheric nuclear detonation in Nevada, before tritium there will no longer pose a problem for the area.
Of course, tritium also escapes from our existing nuclear reactors and is routinely found near such facilities where it occurs “naturally” during the fission process. In fact, after Illinois farmers discovered their wells had been contaminated by the nearby Braidwood nuclear plant, they successfully sued the site’s operator Exelon, which, in 2005, was caught discharging 6.2 million gallons of tritium-laden water into the soil.
In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) allows the industry to monitor for tritium releases at nuclear sites; the industry is politely asked to alert the NRC in a “timely manner” if tritium is either intentionally or accidentally released. But a June 2011 report issued by the Government Accountability Office cast doubt on the NRC’s archaic system for assessing tritium discharges, suggesting that it’s anything but effective. (“Absent such an assessment, we continue to believe that NRC has no assurance that the Groundwater Protection Initiative will lead to prompt detection of underground piping system leaks as nuclear power plants age.”)
Consider all of this a way of saying that, if the NRC isn’t doing an adequate job of monitoring tritium leaks already occurring with regularity at the country’s nuclear plants, how the heck will it do a better job of tracking the stuff at fusion plants in the future? And as I suggest in my new book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, the NRC is plain awful at just about everything it does.
Instruments of Death
All of that got me wondering: if tritium, vital for the fusion process, is radioactive, and if they aren’t going to be operating those lasers in time to put the brakes on climate change, what’s really going on here?
Maybe some clues lie (as is so often the case) in history. The initial idea for a fusion reaction was proposed by English physicist Arthur Eddington in 1920. More than 30 years later, on November 1, 1952, the first full-scale U.S. test of a thermonuclear device, “Operation Ivy,” took place in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. It yielded a mushroom-cloud explosion from a fusion reaction equivalent in its power to 10.4 Megatons of TNT. That was 450 times more powerful than the atomic bomb the U.S. had dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki only seven years earlier to end World War II. It created an underwater crater 6,240 feet wide and 164 feet deep.
“The Shot, as witnessed aboard the various vessels at sea, is not easily described,” noted a military report on that nuclear experiment. “Accompanied by a brilliant light, the heat wave was felt immediately at distances of thirty to thirty-five miles. The tremendous fireball, appearing on the horizon like the sun when half-risen, quickly expanded after a momentary hover time.”
Nicknamed “Ivy Mike,” the bomb was a Teller-Ulam thermonuclear device, named after its creators Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. It was also the United States’ first full-scale hydrogen bomb, an altogether different beast than the two awful nukes dropped on Japan in August 1945. Those bombs utilized fission in their cores to create massive explosions. But Ivy Mike gave a little insight into what was still possible for future weapons of annihilation.
The details of how the Teller-Ulam device works are still classified, but historian of science Alex Wellerstein explained the concept well in the New Yorker:
“The basic idea is, as far as we know, as follows. Take a fission weapon — call it the primary. Take a capsule of fusionable material, cover it with depleted uranium, and call it the secondary. Take both the primary and the secondary and put them inside a radiation case — a box made of very heavy materials. When the primary detonates, radiation flows out of it, filling the case with X rays. This process, which is known as radiation implosion, will, through one mechanism or another… compress the secondary to very high densities, inaugurating fusion reactions on a large scale. These fusion reactions will, in turn, let off neutrons of such a high energy that they can make the normally inert depleted uranium of the secondary’s casing undergo fission.”
Got it? Ivy Mike was, in fact, a fission explosion that initiated a fusion reaction. But ultimately, the science of how those instruments of death work isn’t all that important. The takeaway here is that, since first tried out in that monstrous Marshall Islands explosion, fusion has been intended as a tool of war. And sadly, so it remains, despite all the publicity about its possible use some distant day in relation to climate change. In truth, any fusion breakthroughs are potentially of critical importance not as a remedy for our warming climate but for a future apocalyptic world of war. Despite all the fantastic media publicity, that’s how the U.S. government has always seen it and that’s why the latest fusion test to create “energy” was executed in the utmost secrecy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. One thing should be taken for granted: the American government is interested not in using fusion technology to power the energy grid, but in using it to further strengthen this country’s already massive arsenal of atomic weapons.
Consider it an irony, under the circumstances, but in its announcement about the success at Livermore — though this obviously wasn’t what made the headlines — the Department of Energy didn’t skirt around the issue of gains for future atomic weaponry. Jill Hruby, the department’s undersecretary for nuclear security, admitted that, in achieving a fusion ignition, researchers had “opened a new chapter in NNSA’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program.” (NNSA stands for the National Nuclear Security Administration.) That “chapter” Hruby was bragging about has a lot more to do with “modernizing” the country’s nuclear weapons capabilities than with using laser fusion to end our reliance on fossil fuels.
“Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb,” Edward Teller once said, “there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian. I have no regrets.” Some attitudes die hard.
Buried deep in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s website, the government comes clean about what these fusion experiments at the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) are really all about:
“NIF’s high energy density and inertial confinement fusion experiments, coupled with the increasingly sophisticated simulations available from some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, increase our understanding of weapon physics, including the properties and survivability of weapons-relevant materials… The high rigor and multidisciplinary nature of NIF experiments play a key role in attracting, training, testing, and retaining new generations of skilled stockpile stewards who will continue the mission to protect America into the future.”
Yes, despite all the media attention to climate change, this is a rare yet intentional admission, surely meant to frighten officials in China and Russia. It leaves little doubt about what this fusion breakthrough means. It’s not about creating future clean energy and never has been. It’s about “protecting” the world’s greatest capitalist superpower. Competitors beware.
Sadly, fusion won’t save the Arctic from melting, but if we don’t put a stop to it, that breakthrough technology could someday melt us all.
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