ASIDE FROM BEING less profitable and more difficult to implement than conventional methods, so-called green energy has another, far more important problem to overcome: It’s for pussies.
Or at least that’s the popular consensus. Sorry, hippies, I want to save the world as much as the next Bruce Willis, but there’s simply nothing sexy about our available alternative energy sources. All of our past major fuels have had at least one important thing in common that eco-friendly power lacks: They could fucking kill you. Fossil fuels burn, nuclear power irradiates, and coal once killed a man in Kentucky just to win a bet. Even pre-Industrial Revolution power was distilled from pure badass. Whale oil was the fuel of choice, and this was at a time when whales were poorly understood leviathans. They were quite literally demons of the deep—near legendary creatures the size of your entire goddamn boat—and the only way you could read your copy of
Well, lucky for the planet, science is about to change all that and make green energy as sexy and dangerous as she is renewable and clean. It’s just that it may be at the expense of all of our lives.
THE FUTURE OF HYDROGEN ENERGY
At the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England, a group of scientists is refining designs for a new energy facility they call HiPER (high power laser energy research). This facility, apart from proving that scientists cheat at acronyms (if you’re being fair about it, it should be HPLER, but “Hipler” apparently isn’t sexy enough, sounding more like Adolf’s rap alias than a high-tech research center), may also solve the world’s growing energy crisis in the most awesome way that science knows how…
With lasers!
The HiPER facility is pursuing the heretofore presumed pipe dream of nuclear fusion, which they hope to achieve by using a combination of hydrogen and superlasers. The idea is to build a superefficient, giant, rapid-fire laser—not for world domination or eliminating that bastard James Bond, but to superheat a tiny little pellet of hydrogen. The hydrogen would be dropped down a 33-foot concrete and lithium shaft, where, upon reaching the dead center of the reaction chamber, it would be struck with 192 separate lasers, the combined output of which would be 500
You see that, hippies? That’s how you fucking do green energy. Maybe some people won’t trade horsepower and performance for mileage, but even if it tops out at 16 mph, comes in only bright pink, and the engine sounds like Tiny Tim singing Hello Kitty songs, there’s still not a man alive who wouldn’t drive an electric car powered by goddamn
• Whiskey
• Punches
• Pulling it with your dick
If “lasers” = “good,” then “more lasers” = “gooder.”
Clearly, the logic is infallible.
Though this technology isn’t quite feasible yet, it is close: Technicians at the National Ignition Facility, part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, while typically busy having the most badass job titles in the history of everything, are also spending their time carrying out early versions of the experiment right now, and eventually hope to combine their efforts with the new HiPER facility to create a viable electrical grid.
A few worrisome things about this process, however, are the temperatures and pressures created: Akin to a tiny, controlled sun, remember? So, how much of an issue is containment? The process has already been proven viable by the National Ignition Facility, and they’re planning to scale up to a larger form when the HiPER facility is built, yet little is said of containing this energy in the event of a failure. Forgive me for being a tad bit worried when somebody borrows a plot point from a comic book supervillain’s best-laid revenge schemes just to power their home, but creating a miniature sun on the surface of the Earth seems like the God King of bad ideas. After all, back in the ’40s there were rumblings that the first nuclear tests would ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere, leading to a global chain reaction that would, in turn, ignite all of the air on Earth—and they still went ahead with testing the bombs.
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I hope this kind of thing helps you see why trust is still an issue, Science. Seeing as how you risked lighting our lungs on fire just to build a better bomb, I don’t know if we as a people are ready to let you penetrate our pristine, virginal electrical grids with your hot, throbbing lasers. It might just be too soon to go all the way with you; at least prove you’re not going to strangle us for kicks afterward.
THE FUTURE OF WIND ENERGY
Even assuming that the fusion lasers don’t get us, there’s also a new experiment in alternative power under way in Canada. It’s called the AVE, which is short for Atmospheric Vortex Engine (Note: That’s how you do acronyms, scientists. The pseudobiblical tones succeed in scaring the shit out of us with three little letters alone), and it’s got the scientific community in a whirl.
Well, more like a whirlwind.
Actually, exactly like a whirlwind.
That’s what the AVE is, after all: a giant, artificial tornado, reaching up to ten kilometers straight into the atmosphere. Like slapping a leash on a volcano, the AVE proposes to literally tame a natural disaster by creating and controlling its point of origin, then harnessing the resultant power. The principles it functions on are pretty straightforward: Tornados are formed by cool and warm air mixing in sufficient quantities. So it’s really just a simple matter of forcing the warm air upward far enough to contact the cool air above… and then attempting to harness a force of nature that has killed human beings and destroyed cities since the beginning of time.
Listen: Canadians are great—national health care, clean cities, a very polite disposition—but there’s a limit to how much faith Americans can have in their neighbors up north, and literally reaping the whirlwind might be a little beyond that.
• Politeness
• Hockey
• Syrup
