Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

Author:Carl Sagan [Sagan, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Science, Essays, History, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Popular works, Cosmology, Astronomy, Astrophysics & Space Science, Miscellanea
ISBN: 9780679411604
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1997-06-02T10:00:00+00:00

together. In principle, fusion power plants might run off sea-water—a virtually inexhaustible supply—generating no greenhouse gases, posing no dangers of radioactive waste, and wholly uninvolved with uranium and plutonium. But "in principle" doesn't count. We're in a hurry. With enormous efforts and very high technology, we are now perhaps at the point where a fusion reactor will barely generate a little more power than it uses up. The prospect for fusion power is a prospect of hypothetical, enormous, expensive, high-technology systems, which even their proponents do not imagine being available on a commercial scale for many decades. We do not have many decades. Early versions are likely to generate stupendous quantities of radioactive waste. And in any case, it's hard to imagine such systems as the answer for the developing world.

What I've talked about in the last paragraph is hot fusion— so called for a good reason: You have to bring materials up to temperatures of millions of degrees or more, as in the interior of the Sun, to make fusion go. There have also been claims for something called cold fusion, which was first announced in 1989. The apparatus sits on a desk; you put in some kinds of hydrogen, some palladium metal, run an electric current, and, it is claimed, out comes more energy than you put in, as well as neutrons and other signs of nuclear reactions. If only this were true, it might be the ideal solution to global warming. Many scientific groups all over the world have looked into cold fusion. If there's any merit to the claim, the rewards, of course, would be enormous. The overwhelming judgment of the community of physicists worldwide is that cold fusion is an illusion, a melange of measurement errors, absence of proper control experiments, and a confusion of chemical with nuclear reactions. But there are a few groups of scientists in various nations that are continuing to look into cold fusion—the Japanese Government, for 152 • Billions and Billions

example, has supported such research at a low level—and each such claim should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Maybe some subtle, ingenious new technology—wholly unforeseen at this moment—is just around the corner that will provide tomorrow's energy. There have been surprises before. But it would be foolhardy to bet on it.

For many reasons, developing countries are particularly vulnerable to global warming. They are less able to adapt to new climates, adopt new crops, reforest, build seawalls, accommodate to drought and floods.

At the same time they are especially dependent on fossil fuels. What is more natural than for China, say—with the world's second largest coal reserves—to rely on fossil fuels during its exponential industrialization? And if emissaries from Japan, Western Europe, and the United States were to go to Beijing and ask for restraint in the burning of coal and oil, wouldn't China point out that these nations did not exercise such restraint during their industrialization? (And anyway the 1992 Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratified by 150 countries, calls

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