Fusion is the Future

By Michael Steger

Fusion energy can be developed within twenty years with the necessary funding. Once accomplished, it will transform the scientific understanding of the role of our human species.

Atop Telegraph Hill, Christopher Columbus sits looking out across the Pacific to China and all of Asia. This was true centuries ago when Europeans looked across the Atlantic to a New World free of an imperial system. Today, the potential for collaboration with China, Russia, South Korea, Japan, India and others on the development of commercial fusion energy presents the greatest potential for growth and development in the United States today, and will once again free us from an imperial system of green pseudo-science, financial collapse, and approaching world war.

Consider nuclear NAWAPA XXI, a continental water and nuclear power development program that provides an advanced platform for cities, industry and agriculture - from southern Alaska and western Canada, to the western banks of the Mississippi, West Texas, and the northern states of Mexico. A project of this nature will provide an immediate potential for major productive-job development and national profits in physical income, as measured by a Hamiltonian banking system, reviving our industrial and manufacturing base and our potential for trade with the nations of Asia.

However, without a commitment to fusion energy achieved within the next twenty years, this kind of project will be insufficient, though ultimately necessary, to accomplish the development of our entire population. Fusion is the next leap forward for mankind, creating, relatively speaking, an infinite resource base and an unlimited potential for development. With fusion power and a NAWAPA-era of development, we could achieve nothing less than the end of poverty and hunger on every continent within twenty years, and anything less is morally unacceptable. That should be the goal of every American patriot, and world citizen today. Fusion Power, Asteroids, and Beyond

On December 14, 2013 China became the third nation to establish a research facility on the surface of the moon. As it was for us in the 1960's, this is not an accomplishment only for China, it is an accomplishment for all of mankind. The challenge before us now is the continued existence of the human species beyond the current century, or perhaps even the current year or decade, if thermonuclear war is not avoided. What the solar system presents is an unlimited area of exploration and discovery, and this must be integral to our long term economic planning.

Yet, a great danger lurks nearby in millions of near Earth asteroids, many of which have the potential to devastate entire cities, nations, and potentially the entire planet without warning. Based on this scientific assessment, the U.S. must initiate an immediate international collaborative effort to establish, and confirm, the power to divert an asteroid from a possible collision with Earth, such as the Russian proposal of this kind entitled the Strategic Defense of Earth, or SDE.

This will require immediate and significant funding towards thermonuclear fusion rockets and fusion commercial power, including major funding for U.S. projects at Princeton, MIT, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, as well as others.

Our youth need a mission, one that requires their full creative participation. For human creativity is not a question of individual survival, it is a question of mankind's long-term survival.

From this perspective of the next twenty years, of fusion energy, NAWAPA, and asteroid defense, all as part of a Pacific basin-centered economic system, we can achieve a critical step forward for mankind, here on Earth and to the stars.