Precious joules: a fusion-energy result

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In New York, I'm Jon Fassman. Every weekday for 1,000 episodes so far, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The law Joe Biden signed yesterday basically ratifies the status quo. Same-sex marriages performed in one state must be recognized by others. And religious institutions cannot be forced to perform them. But the compromise behind the bill matters a great deal. And some of the world's finest tea comes from Darjeeling in India's West Bengal state. But cheaper imports from Nepal just over the border and climate change shrinking harvests mean the champagne of teas faces an uncertain future. It's a dream that's been a decade away for many decades. Nuclear fusion, an energy source that could revolutionize the world. We've had nuclear power for generations.

The chain of atom splitting or burning created by the neutrons —will in time consume all the uranium-235 contained in the uranium fuel.

It's a relatively green but also controversial way of producing electricity that has at times proven dangerous.

This is the moment Japan's nuclear disaster began. A giant tsunami wave crashes into the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, seriously damaging the nuclear reactor.

Some radioactive steam escaped into the building housing the reactor and eventually out into the plant But fusion, if it could be harnessed, would not only be a carbon-free energy source, it would also produce virtually no waste. Achieving fusion has long eluded researchers, but now scientists in America have announced a breakthrough.

So on Tuesday, America's Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced that the National Ignition Facility, NIF, which is a government laboratory, had made what it called a big step towards realistic fusion energy.

Alok Jha is a science correspondent for The Economist.

It had achieved something called gain, which is when more energy comes out of a fusion reaction than you used to make it start in the first place. And they've hailed this as a big breakthrough.

So we'll get to the breakthrough part later, but let's do some background for us non-scientists. What is fusion and why is it so important?

So fusion is a process where you take very light elements, hydrogen mainly, and you fuse them together. And what happens is that a small amount of the mass of the nuclei of those two atoms actually gets converted into energy. This is by Einstein's famous equation, E mc². And that conversion of mass into energy is actually enormous. There's a lot of energy contained in a small amount of mass. Now this is the process by which all the stars in the universe shine. It's a very common process, and if you have lots of atoms of hydrogen fusing, you get lots and lots of energy out, as is evident by the night sky around you and the sun, in fact, all that we see every day. Now the thing is that fusion is incredibly difficult to do because atoms normally repel each other. If you remember your high school science lessons, they've got electrons on the outside, these repel each other, and if they get close, they fly apart. But what happens inside stars is that the pressures and temperatures are so high that the hydrogen atoms are forced so closely together that a different fundamental force starts to react, which brings these atoms together, fuses them, creates helium, and releases energy.

So that happens inside stars. Why have people been pursuing nuclear fusion for so long?

Well, so fusion is the source of virtually all the energy on the Earth. So when you think about it, all of the energy on Earth comes ultimately from the fusion processes going on inside the Sun. A plant converts light from the Sun into chemical energy, which we eat as food and becomes eventually coal and oil. But all of that energy comes from light from the Sun, which is created during fusion reactions. And so if you could reproduce it on Earth, then there are many advantages. You would have a limitless supply of energy because the fuel for fusion on Earth, hydrogen and deuterium, which is a heavy form of hydrogen, there's limitless amounts of it in seawater. There would be no carbon emissions and also very, very little nuclear waste. So this dream has existed for decades that if we could get fusion to work on Earth, and you know, it should be possible, then we would solve all of our energy problems, climate change, all of these things. You take a big chunk out of all of that.

Why has it been so difficult to achieve?

Well, it's incredibly difficult to do because The forces and pressures and temperatures you need to push atoms together is incredibly astonishing. You need to do some very, very clever engineering to make it work on Earth. Fusion occurs inside the center of the sun because of the absolutely crushing enormous amounts of gravity that pulls all the atoms together, and also the enormous temperatures. And these conditions mean that the atoms will come together and fuse and release the energy. If you want to do the same thing on Earth, you have to try and recreate those conditions, and it's incredibly hard to create the sort of amount of gravity and the extremes of temperature that you need in order to make them fuse. On top of all of that, you need to find the kinds of materials that can contain these wildly hot and complicated gases that are gonna be doing the fusing for you, and that's proved incredibly difficult because, Any normal material just gets completely destroyed in the process. So it's been decades to try and do all of that. At places like NIF, what they try and do is for microseconds, or maybe even less, just mimic a small fraction of what's going on inside the Sun. And so you might just achieve the pressures and temperatures you need.

So how do they do that?

It takes a very small pellet of fuel, so a little bit of hydrogen and tritium, and tritium is a radioactive heavier version of hydrogen. Takes this pellet and focuses about 200 different lasers onto it from different directions in the hope of imploding this pellet. And the idea is that if you implode the pellet, then the shockwaves will force the atoms inside to fuse. No systems have worked very well so far. They've proved that fusion can happen, but not in a way that actually releases more energy than you put in, which is kind of what you need for a power station. It's taken decades and it's just not quite worked.

Until now though, right? You said that at NIF they were now able to not only make fusion happen, but they also got more energy out of it than they put in. So this is a significant breakthrough, right?

So it's significant in a very technical sense, but let's give them some credit. What NIF have achieved is something called gain. That means more energy came out of the fusion reaction than went in via the lasers, which is important, of course, if you want to create a power station. The way I think about it is a bit like this. Imagine you've got a pile of wood and that you're trying to light a fire. A way of thinking about what NIF does is that the pellet of hydrogen fuel inside the system is the wood. That's the fuel. And the 200 lasers that are focused onto the pellet, those are the matches that you use to set the whole thing off. Now, for more than a decade, what NIF has been doing is to keep lighting matches, in other words, firing lasers onto the wood but it's never caught fire and sustained a burn, so it's not worked. But what last week they did was that they finally made their pile of wood catch fire. The wood started to burn, it burnt through and released lots of energy. That's called ignition, and it's very neat in principle.

So in that in principle, I hear a reason to sort of be cautious. What are the caveats with this breakthrough?

So the pellet of fuel that they used released around 3 megajoules of energy, and the energy that actually that pellet absorbed from the lasers was around 2 2 megajoules. So it's a gain of around 150%, which sounds impressive. But if you look at the whole system of lasers, it takes about 300 megajoules worth of electrical energy to produce the 2 megajoules of laser beams that ended up being fired onto the pellet. To make those 2 megajoules of lasers, you waste a lot of energy in the process. It's just not a very efficient process. So in fact, the amount of energy in total that was used to create this ignition, it was much, much, much more than was released in the end. So that's one thing to think about. And also, you've got to think about the fact that firing laser beams in a very, very precise pattern onto a tiny, tiny, tiny pellet of fuel is really, really, really hard to get right. It took the scientists at NIF more than a decade to make this work. And, you know, if you're gonna have a decent-sized power station, you need more than 2 megajoules or 3 megajoules of energy coming out of each pellet. Just to put that into context, 3 megajoules of energy, it's like a little flame that comes out from burning a bit of kindling. It disappears in a second or two. It's not much at all. So if you want a power station, you need to be imploding thousands of these pellets every single hour, or, you know, maybe tens of thousands every single day. And NIF can do one shot every single week. So you can start to see the scale of the challenge to actually making what this very exciting result is, to make that into something useful for all of us.

So we're still a long ways off from fusion power stations.

I'm afraid so. The engineering challenge is still enormous. And it's worth also saying that, you know, NIF, the way it does fusion is not the way that most other experiments in the world, whether commercial or publicly funded, it's not the way that they're doing fusion. Other people, generally speaking, trying to create a plasma, which is an electrically charged, high-energy gas of hydrogen and other fuels. And they contain it within a magnetic field in the shape of a donut, essentially a torus, and then raise the temperature of it to try and make things fuse inside. And that's how the other large fusion experiments are working. There's one in the south of France called ITER. It's gonna cost something like $20 billion when it's finished, and it will hopefully produce fusion in the next decade or so. And gain maybe by 2050. So that's the one that all these scientists are actually betting on. It's not NIF. Having said all of that, that type of fusion has never proved gain. It's never got out more energy than you put in, which NIF has proved. So from a physics point of view, this is really interesting what NIF has done, and it will really encourage fusion researchers. But in terms of actual fusion power, we're talking at least 50 years, maybe 60 years ahead. You know, it's not going to happen tomorrow.

But let's end, Alec, by looking at the big picture. How should we think about what happened? Was it a sort of laudable but not terribly relevant for the wider world breakthrough, or is this the start of a new energy age for the world?

That's a very good question, and I think that the answer is both. What I mean by that is that fusion has been worked on for such a long time, and so what NIF has done is kind of the latest iteration of 40 or 50 years' worth of continuous iteration in the engineering of that project. And so from a scientific point of view, it's definitely an important step. It is not going to be the way that we end up doing fusion energy. We will create fusion energy in some form in 50 or 60 or 70 years. We know it's possible. We see it all around us every day and every night in the form of stars. When it does happen, then it'll only happen because Scientists have been working on this already 50 years and will continue working on it for another 50 or 60 years. That's how hard it is. But what's 100 years in the scale of human history when it comes to solving probably the biggest challenge we have in terms of our energy consumption? And so it will happen, but it will just take a long time.

All right, Alec, thanks very much for stopping by today.

You're very welcome.

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Yesterday, President Joe Biden invited thousands of people to the White House to witness an historic moment. Today, I sign the Respect for Marriage Act into law. The signing of the Respect for Marriage Act is a milestone for millions of gay Americans. Their right to marry and have those marriages recognized across the country is finally protected by law. President Biden hailed the moment as a bipartisan triumph. This law matters to every single American, no matter who you are or who you love.

This shouldn't be about conservative or liberal, red or blue.

No, this is about realizing the promise of the Declaration of Independence, a promise rooted in sacred and secular beliefs. Its passage saves gay marriage from the same fate suffered by Roe v. Wade, stripped back by a right-leaning Supreme Court. And there's hope that this bill could serve as a template for how to legislate through a bitter and divisive culture war.

This bill and its passage is a really important moment for gay Americans, but also for their families.

John Pridow is The Economist's US editor.

Up until now, gay marriage has legally been dependent on a Supreme Court ruling, and in theory, at any given time, the court could turn around and say 'You know what, that case that we decided was wrongly decided, and the right to gay marriage in America would disappear with it.' That can no longer happen because there's now a federal gay marriage law.

Before we talk about what this bill actually does and says, remind us how we got to this point.

Well, this is really a story that begins 50 years ago in the early 1970s, when a gay couple, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, applied unsuccessfully for a marriage license in Minnesota. The campaign for gay marriage in America effectively launched then, and it was quite a fringe campaign up until, I'd say, the 1990s. And in the time since then, support for gay marriage in America has gone from a fairly fringe position to a very mainstream position. About 70% of Americans support gay marriage now, including a majority of Republicans. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges that gay marriage was constitutional. But that means that from 2015 until now, the right to gay marriage has depended on a Supreme Court ruling rather than a law passed by Congress. If you look at most other Western countries where gay marriage is legal, and it is legal in most of them now, pretty much everywhere, this has been a question that's settled by the legislature rather than by the courts. And so America, in a sense, is now coming into line with the rest of the West on gay marriage.

Tell us about the fear underlying this bill, the fear that the right to gay marriage could be overturned if the Supreme Court reversed itself. How would that work? And do you think it was likely?

Well, I think there's some fear on both sides on this one, and that explains why the law says what it says. So just on that first, the law says that in those states where gay marriage is legal, the federal government will recognise those marriages. In states where gay marriage is not the law of the land, a state like Texas, for example, the federal government will not force Texas to change and introduce gay marriage. However, gay marriages performed in other states must be recognised by the state of Texas. So it's a real compromise position here between and gay rights and a religious liberty position, if you like. And so the fear for the gay rights side of the argument was that just as the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent on abortion, this court with its clear conservative majority might overturn Obergefell and gay marriage would no longer be the law of the land. On the religious liberty side, there was a fear among some people that the majority that supports gay marriage would essentially use state power to force a law on the minority that their consciences couldn't accept. So this is really a compromise between those two positions, and I think it's one that both sides have wound up pretty happy with, which is an extraordinary achievement for any culture war issue in America. It is.

But isn't there an argument that this bill doesn't really do anything at all On the one hand, it says that marriages solemnized in one state have to be recognized in others. That's already the case, right? My wife and I got married in Connecticut. We lived in Georgia and New York as a married couple. On the other hand, it says that the federal government will not revoke tax exemptions from religious institutions that don't solemnize gay marriage. That's already the case. So what does this bill actually do? Why does it matter?

I think it matters for two reasons. One is almost an emotional reason, which is that if you go back to 1970 and those first attempts to get gay marriage passed in America, I think what a lot of gay couples wanted was recognition in law that their marriages were essentially as normal and at the same time remarkable as every other marriage in America. I think there's something special that comes from a law passed through the legislature through normal procedures that lends a sense of security to gay Americans and also to their families and gives that kind of recognition that those people have craved for such a long time. So there's that. But then I would say that the fear of the Supreme Court overturning Obergefell and therefore overturning gay marriage in America is more than a theoretical one. And so gay marriage is now backstopped by the legislature, by the bill that Joe Biden has signed. And so that provides real security for gay Americans and for their families.

So we saw this bill signed into law by a Democratic president. And of course, Democrats hold both houses of Congress at the moment. Was this bill passed along party lines or did it have bipartisan support?

No, it had a good deal of bipartisan support. Lots of support from Republicans in the Senate, which is really good to see. I mean, this is a question where the opposition is small but intense, and in the way America's system is set up, Congress is set up, John, you know, you know this 'cause you wrote about this for many years for The Economist, it's quite easy to assemble a blocking minority. And so this law was crafted very carefully to get the maximum number of people on board. There were two things that meant that it happened relatively quickly. One, the overturning of Roe v. Wade concentrated people's minds on this question. And two, the fact that the Republicans won the midterm elections for the House of Representatives means that because the incoming Republican majority in the House in January probably wouldn't do this on its own, this is something that had to get done in the lame duck session, which we're in now. So there were those two things that conspired to mean that it happened now as opposed to last year or next year.

Earlier in this conversation, you explained that this was a compromise structurally rather than substantively speaking. To what extent do you think this is a model for other sort of hot-button culture war issues?

Well, I really hope it is. I mean, there's an argument First off, let's start with this. There's an argument that it's not, that compared with, say, gun rights in America, gay marriage is not really asking anybody to give anything up. Now, your principles might be offended by gay marriage, but there's an extent to which a gay couple getting married doesn't take anything away from you. Whereas with gun laws, if you wanted, say, to ban large-capacity magazines or ban long rifles that can reload very quickly. Lots of Americans own those things. And so if you pass that law, you are actually taking a thing away from people that they value. Where I would say there is some commonality and what leads me to be cheered by this, not just the law in itself, but I think there's a really interesting principle at work in how the compromise was crafted, which is something that our former colleague Jonathan Rauch, who's a longtime campaigner for gay marriage, has pointed out, which is that essentially the bill disarms the worst fears of both sides. So for gay Americans, they were worried that if the court were to overrule its previous judgments, they would be left in relationships that had no federal legal standing. And that's obviously a terrifying thought. And for those who have religiously motivated objections to gay marriage, they were worried that they would be forced to swallow something that they just couldn't swallow. And so the bill quite carefully tried to address the worst fears of both sides. And I think once you go into legislating in that spirit, it's maybe a bit easier to find the kind of compromise, the kind of middle path that often seems so elusive in American politics. So I would like to think that there's something here that can be applied more generally to other really divisive culture war questions in American politics. Let's hope so.

John, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks, John.

Darjeeling tea is traditionally a black tea.

However, on full moon nights, some of One of the 87 gardens of Darjeeling embark on a full moon harvest, during which special white teas are prepared. Now, much stargazing precedes this harvest usually, typically done only 5 or 6 times in a year.

In hills deep in India's West Bengal province, Sparsh Agrawal grows tea.

So on full moon nights, hundreds of men and women in traditional costumes will gather on the hill slopes of Salemal Tea Garden just after dusk. Some men will be beating their hand drums, others will be holding up torches, not so much for the light as to ward off the elephants and leopards that roam the hill slopes. The women will begin dancing in a wide circle, and as they dance, they will be chanting ancient Vedic hymns for fortune and for protection. Before midnight, the expert The pluckers, working at blinding speed, will have plucked some 200 kgs of tea leaves, which they will then process before dawn. Our belief is that the slightest touch of sun on the plucked leaves will ruin the tea's aroma and consistency. The tea we make on such nights are delicate and floral. It has character, clarity, and complexity. This is Darjeeling's best-kept secret, its greatest treasure.

About 7 million kilograms of Darjeeling tea is produced every year, which is a relatively small amount within the larger tea market as a whole.

Hamza Jilani writes about foreign affairs for The Economist.

The growers like Sparsh Agarwal are part of an industry that, though it's not super big in terms of market size, it is incredibly important for the people who grow it and the people who love it. The highest quality Darjeeling teas can fetch up to $2,000 per kilogram on the international market. But the product itself is often compared to champagne as this very high-quality, high-grade tea. I mean, Queen Elizabeth II used to be a very big fan of Darjeeling teas, among other kind of luxury markets. And the tea themselves have a very special history as well. They were created in the 19th century. By the British colonial powers in Darjeeling, and the estates were eventually sold during independence to local Indian growers. It's become a really key cultural hallmark for the country. But all of that said, the industry has really found itself in hot water. The Tea Board of India, which is the state agency in charge of regulating tea, has requested a huge $120 million bailout for the industry. Because they're concerned that it's going underwater.

Well, tell us more about that, Hamza. What is it that's causing farmers problems now?

So there's been two big problems, and I guess I'll start with one of the bigger economic issues that's really putting stress on the tea, which is trade between Nepal and India. So a recent problem has been that Darjeeling teas are produced in West Bengal, which has higher labor and wage practices relative to Nepal. And as a result, there's these knockoff teas from Nepal that seem similar, and they're being illegally packaged into Darjeeling tea packages and sold on their national market. And that means that a lot of these tea estates are losing demand that they rely on to stay profitable. But the second big problem is climate change.

Tell us more about that. How is that impacting the industry?

As a whole, what climate change has done over the last 20 years is really shrink the amount of supply of tea being produced by Darjeeling. Over the last few decades, they've gone down from producing 12 million kilograms of tea every year to just 7 million. And the reason's because the season has shortened by a month over the last two decades. There's less rain coming in year on year, and temperatures have gone up by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. And at the same time, we're seeing some crazy extreme weather events like summertime hailstorms and droughts during the monsoon season, which is making it difficult for them to predict how much crop they're going to grow. And they're also seeing an increase in pest infestations that go up with rising temperatures.

So altogether, what does that mean for these tea growers?

Well, it means they're in a really bad state. I mean, I'm hearing from tea growers on the ground that they don't know if they'll survive for another 3 to 4 years. Half of them are facing bankruptcy and are struggling to find new buyers for their tea. And the ones that aren't bankrupt fear that they're going to be going underwater soon and they're hemorrhaging money really, really fast.

You mentioned earlier that the state tea board is appealing for funds. Are farmers on the ground hopeful the government will offer support or are they trying to find their own solutions?

Well, they're not super hopeful, which is sad. I mean, we heard from Sparsh Agarwal, one of the growers, earlier. That they're concerned that the government just wants to let these tea estates go underwater and let real estate developers come in. And they're trying to work together to think of solutions, whether by teaming together as estates and cartelizing to have better control over prices, or trying to go direct-to-consumer, creating their own kind of bespoke delivery services that allows them to take advantage of their role as a luxury good. But overall, I mean, there's a lot of fear in the community that we could be looking at the end of what was a pretty historic export from India for a long time.

My family has been managing Darjeeling tea gardens for 4 generations now. And so for starters, the collapse of this industry represents both a personal and a familiar loss. There's also entire communities that reside in these tea estates. I manage Salem Hill Tea Garden, which employs 500 members of the local community. That's about 500 families and close to 2,000 people who are dependent on the tea garden for their livelihoods. Finally, for your listeners, it's worth asking, if our tradition and handicraft, which makes this India's finest export product, collapses, how will they continue consuming the finest teas in the world?

Hamza, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Don't forget, we want to hear from you in our listener survey. What you like, what you don't, how you listen, the works. Do follow the link that's in the notes for today's episode, and we'll see See you back here tomorrow.