The World's Energy Crisis

The Energy Crisis

As the global population of human beings increase, so does its energy needs, which already is becoming a big problem. As countries become developed, their energy needs increase exponentially. Finding enough energy to sustain the human growth at the rate that its at now is nearly impossible with today's technology. This is the concern of many economists and intellectuals who have spoken out about this fact; the belief is that we have 45 years worth of oil left at today's consumption rate and much less factoring in the rate at which humans are being born. Just to put this into perspective, China and India both have more than a billion people living in their borders each, without some sort of filter to slow growth in these and many countries, we will have both an extreme overpopulation problem and an energy emergency. Short of attempting to control population (which is likely to be very disputed and disobeyed), our world is headed for a period of serious unrest the likes of which we have not seen before. This is the real reason why we must work towards creating technologies that help to control this curve, but still allow for our technological growth. An example of this is EnergyStar appliances that are using much less power to operate than their counterparts. One might believe that to help with this issue, we should all start driving electric cars or even hybrid cars believing that they can get infinite mileage from this without adding to this crisis, but what those people likely don't realize is that electricity is an energy carrier, not an energy source. This means that the electricity to run your car had to come from somewhere, and more than likely, that power is coming from a power plant using fossil fuels. This also doesn't factor in the amount of waste products we are forced to deal with when dealing with power plants that use fossil fuels like coal. For example, an average coal power plant will use approximately 9000 tons worth of coal EACH day! This gives off around 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide, 600 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 80 tons of nitrogen dioxide. This is a lot of waste products per day for a single plant! We obviously need to find a way to cut down on the usage of these types of fuel.

Is Fusion the Answer?

That is not an easy question to answer, as a number of the concerns associated with classic power generation such as the harmful byproducts can be eliminated using fusion power. Whereas a coal power plant gives off many tons of byproducts, a fusion reactor will take in 1 pound of Deuterium and 1.5 pounds of tritium and expel only 4 pounds of Helium-4 (stable gas) and high speed neutrons, which as discussed before is a problem, but is not insurmountable with proper upkeep of the plant. However, to say that fusion is the end all solution to our problems is unrealistic. We still have many years before ITER goes active, and even then, its only in experiment to see if fusion would be viable. The reality is that while we are close to a breakthrough, we still have yet to achieve a stable fusion reaction that takes less power to begin than it gives back. This does not mean that in the future we will not see much of the world's power taken over by fusion reactors, but while we may see ITER become the first reactor to break even, it may be out of the scope of our lives to hope to see a world run entirely by fusion. This does not mean we should lose hope though, technologies are being worked on each day to achieve this goal and clever ideas like the Artemis Project are increasing the proposed sustainability of the process for thousands of years into the future with a large profit coming to those willing to mine the Helium-3 needed from the moon.

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