Morning Thanks--fusion

Don't ask me to explain it. Science has never been my strong suit, although once upon a time I aced high school chemistry and I know what the Doppler Effect is (we live a hundred yards from the railroad). I know little more than the perfunctory to explain what has happened, but enough to repeat it here--fusion somehow replicates the energy-producing action of the sun. There's your definition, and this morning that's a very big deal.

Real scientists have been trying to produce fusion in a laboratory for a very, very long time because those in the know understand fusion's benefits could be game-changing--well, life-changing, planet-altering. If harnessing energy from the process researchers have been working at for years--and now, reportedly, have done--the planet's dependency on fossil fuels will eventually--gulp!--come to an end, maybe by 2050. 

Today the U. S. Department of Energy will announce the amazing breakthrough, something so big it's hard to restrain the superlatives. It's, I mean, huge. What fusion uses as fuel is sea water. No open pits required.

The word nuclear is so heavily affixed to meltdowns, Chernobyl, and Nagasaki, that it's more than capable of launching a thousand red flags at its simple mention. Still, nuclear energy is the cleanest fuel we can generate, and nuclear fuel generated from fusion, unlike fission, its sibling, runs on nothing more or less than water and, listen up! isn't dirty, doesn't leave radio-active garbage in its wake.

I can't help thinking scientists creating energy from fusion a big, big deal, a mammoth blessing so big it's hard for a real Calvinist like me to believe--you know, "if it's too good to believe, it is." I'm that brand of Calvinist. 

But somehow I'm a "half-full" guy too, the water in the glass I mean, the kind of optimist some people might identify as a shade too sunny, too comfortably on a cloud nine homestead, too dad-blame naive and rosy. 

It's an unlikely one-two punch. My boss used to say after the crowds left the beach at the park where I worked, "Sheesh! In'it so?--people are pigs." That's the Calvinist. On the other hand, I don't take up residence with the doom-n-gloom bunch all that comfortably. Count me among those who thought the man most deeply shaken by "future shock" was Alvin Toffler, who wrote the book fifty years ago. 

It's hard for me to be dragged, screaming, into the dark night of global warming, in large part because (unCalvinistically) I tend to think those scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory may be on to something. Maybe we can, once more, sidestep doom, saved from all the horror by a brand new form of energy powered by what already covers 71 per cent of the planet and is growing--sea water.

Today, people in the know, real science types, will take center stage and tell us what blessings may be just around the corner. They'll also say that global warming is no myth.

So the Calvinist in me says, "Don't get your hopes up," but this other fellow, the eternal optimist says, "The whole world's in His hands," and we know very well what the rainbow says. 

This morning's thanks is for the divinely blessed human ingenuity personified in those white-smocked scientists at Lawrence Livermore. My word, if what they say is true, welcome to yet another brave new world.  Watch for it today. It's big.