Hello audience! I would like to capture your attention to tell you that there is, in fact, a solution to global warming. And I know a few people, at least, might be wondering how, pondering what.
I know that a few of you are like me who, at one point, fell in love with the clouds, or maybe the sunsets or sunrises, or the shining of the moon or the twinkling of the stars or bright skies.
In 2023, I started noticing the gray tint off in the distance. It is only getting worse. Sometimes it’s so bad that I ask if it’s just dusty, but it’s not. It’s polluted. I want to fix that. But how?
Right around the time this obsession started, my sixth-grade science teacher, Mr. Lalazarian, assigned the class to do a report on some new science event. That is when I read about the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s great success on nuclear fusion.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says fusion could generate “nearly four million times more energy than burning oil or coal.”
Researchers, working on nuclear fusion, are fusing tritium and deuterium together to maximize the amount of energy created in one small area. Wow! It has almost no radioactivity and won’t harm the air or our pretty skies.
OK, so enough blabbering and let me finish it up for you. Nuclear fusion is a slowly but very surely developing method of making clean energy. Tritium, also a version of hydrogen, is very rare and very expensive but can be produced. A good thing to note is that deuterium, a stable isotope of hydrogen, is much less expensive and can be found in seawater.
Finally, let me just tell you this: In 1903, an editorial in the New York Times said that it would be 1 million to 10 million years before flying machines existed. Sixty-nine days later, the Wright brothers flew the first plane. Sixty-six years after the first plane was piloted, space travel happened and people landed on the moon.
It is insane how quickly technology can pick up, so with that I say that an investment in nuclear fusion is an investment well spent on a better future.
Abbott Swartz is an eighth-grade student in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
