If We Can Put a Man on the Moon….

Landing a man on the moon was an astounding American success and a triumphant demonstration of American ingenuity and innovation. But the man on the moon analogy just doesn’t hold up when discussing our efforts to develop renewable, sustainable, and carbon-free sources of energy. 

For lots of reasons—including the burdensome regulatory environment that exists now but that didn’t exist in 1961—I doubt that we could accomplish the Apollo program today with the same expediency that the program enjoyed in the 1960’s. But beyond that, we must remember that the goal of the Apollo program was not to turn us all into the Jetsons by developing a safe, reliable, and affordable system of space travel for all Americans,  but instead to send one mission to the moon, at pretty much any cost, as long as we planted our flag before the Russians planted theirs. Doing something once is quite a different proposition than is developing a sustainable and affordable long-term solution to any problem.  

Sure there are some parallels between the Apollo program and our current efforts to switch to renewable, carbon-free energy solutions. Both require significant investment of government resources, and both require the collaborative efforts of our smartest scientists and engineers. But the parallels end there because it isn’t like we will build one solar farm or one wind farm, plant our flag, and call it a success. 

In reality, our best hope for a carbon-reduced future lies in the U.S. fusion energy science program and the ITER experiment in Cardarache, France. The experiment met a significant milestone last week when the preparation of the site was completed and the property turned over to the ITER Organization, which will build the buildings, construct the tokamak reactor, and conduct the various experiments necessary to put us on the pathway to a demonstration fusion power plant.

Sure, fusion has its skeptics, but so did the early Apollo program—and both have been considered long shots, even in scientific circles. But while solar and wind might nibble around the energy consumption edges, fusion is the only alternative energy source that could ever produce enough power to realistically compete with coal or nuclear power plants as a primary source of electricity for the grid (and at that, only if the price of building a fusion reactor can be substantially reduced). Fusion is the only source of alternative energy that is not dependent upon climate or geography, does not require limited resources to be harvested from the earth, doesn’t emit carbon gas, poses no threat of a runaway reaction, and does not produce waste that has proliferative capabilities. So while fusion power plants won’t provide a near-term solution to our energy dilemma, they are our best hope for the future, and worthy of the sort of investment we made in a space program that piqued our imagination and bolstered our national pride, but generated relatively few societal benefits. 

We can continue to pretend that somehow wind and solar will replace coal as our primary source of electricity in the same way that, as children, so many of us dreamed of flying an aerocar to work or asking Rosie the Robot to clean our rooms. Or, we can get serious about alternative energy and invest in the only viable solution for non-proliferative, carbon-free, and highly-producing renewable energy with the hope that someday fusion power plants will provide reliable, clean and affordable energy to every American and to all of the world.