Solar & Fusion Power

Sustainable, the environmental term we often hear, has three categories by which it can be defined.

• Economically: Profitable, competitive, and makes great business sense.
• Environmentally: Resource efficient, spatially dense, clean, quiet, aesthetically pleasing, provides no disturbance to environment especially wildlife.
• Politicaly: Something both sides of the aisle can agree on throughout the years.

So in order to be "sustainable", a source of power must meet all three of these. Interestingly enough, Dr. Michio Kaku makes an interesting assertion with this clip from Big Think.

He obviously espouses a few ideas which are controversial such as...

• Anthropogenic climate change theory
• Peak oil

What I thought he said about oil was interesting. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, "We're never going to run out of oil, but the oil we do have is going to become more expensive because its in increasingly harder to reach places." For instance oil in Saudi Arabia is already liquid and incredibly clean and ready to go, wheras the tar sands of Alberta Canada, home to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which I support, are going to become more expensive to locate, extract, and refine. To his credit, I appreciate this because most peopel, when advocating for any source of clean energy assert that essentially we're going to run out of oil in x amount of years. Usually a number that will be in people's lifetimes so it's relavent. For instance, they say like 5 years, or 15 years. It's never 261.5 years because then people would just, rightfully, blow it off. Anyways, here's a quick film supporting his statement that we're never going to run out of oil.

Anyways, back to the main point. I like Dr. Kaku's assertion becaus it utilizes everything the sun provides. Fusion is the nuclear process by which the sun produces all its heat and energy which is astronomical and unparalleled, while solar is the byproduct, both of which are, by definition, capable of being sustainable. I say capable because solar is still expensive, and fusion technology will take, at the very least, ten years to achieve. Now, he never makes the assertion that these will replace everything entirely, but that in the coming decades, solar will become cheaper than most fossil fuels due to price fluctuations, demands, volatility, and politics. That being said, with a little faith in the technology and the free market, I believe we will see these technolgies come to dominate the developed world in the coming decades, and the poorer countries later on.