Fusion Will Make Electricity Free — What Abundant Energy Can and Cannot Do

The promise of free electricity

The promise is not new. In 1954 the chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission said of nuclear power that our children would enjoy electricity too cheap to meter. Seventy years on, the meters are still there.

The reason is simple. Fuel is only part of the price of electricity. Building the plant, running it, laying and guarding the wires are the rest. Nuclear fuel is very cheap and the electricity never became free. Fusion is the same: seawater may be free, the power station is not.

So this piece does not ask what happens if electricity is free. It asks what happens if it becomes far cheaper and far more plentiful. That is entirely possible, and it changes a great deal on its own.

Half of what we cannot do is a matter of the electricity bill

Among environmental technologies, fewer than you might think are blocked by not knowing how. Far more are blocked by knowing how and not being able to afford the power. Three examples.

1. Water. Take the salt out of seawater and you have fresh water. The method has been known for a long time. It takes so much electricity that even countries short of water cannot do it freely.
2. Fertiliser. Today's fertiliser is made by burning natural gas. It can be made with electricity instead. The method exists; at today's prices gas is cheaper.
3. Farming. An indoor farm needs a hundredth of the land. It runs on lamps instead of sunlight, so it eats electricity, which is why it only grows things like lettuce.

There are also machines that pull carbon dioxide out of the air, and a few are already running. The trouble is that the electricity they use sometimes releases more carbon than they capture. It is a technology that only makes sense once power is clean and cheap.

So what happens to the Amazon?

Here the answer of the person who wanted to restore nature divides. Energy cannot restore a forest directly; trees do not grow on electricity. But the reason the forest is cut can be removed.

The Amazon is cleared for farmland and pasture. Make the three things above — water, fertiliser, indoor farming — cheap, and the same food can be grown on far less land. Land is left over. Left alone, it becomes forest: nobody has to plant it, seed blows in and grows, and in thirty years it has the shape of a forest.

A little further in

So what is real and what is inflated?

Where the promise came from

The idea that abundant energy remakes the world is as old as the industrial revolution. Coal did it, then oil, and the world really was remade. It has simply never been free.

What makes 1954 special is that a government said it officially. When nuclear power arrived people drew nuclear cars and nuclear aircraft. Twenty years later, in the 1970s, oil prices multiplied and the drawings were put away. That was when it was learned that energy is always there until it is not.

And what Carnot wrote in 1824 applies here too. No machine turns heat wholly into work. Whatever energy you use scatters into heat afterwards, and that heat cannot be gathered again. However much energy there is, that line does not change — which is why waste is never free.

In Daejeon

The abundant-energy end is KSTAR in Yuseong-gu. But as this piece shows, turning surplus energy into water, fertiliser and freed land is separate work, and that work is scattered across Daejeon: the chemical research institute for electrochemistry, the mechanical research institute for desalination and cooling plant. Open Yuseong-gu on the map and the seats are there.

What you would study to do this

1. Someone who builds plant to turn seawater fresh — chemical and mechanical engineering. Already a large industry in the Gulf and Singapore.
2. Someone who makes fertiliser and fuel from electricity — electrochemistry. One of the fastest-growing fields there is.
3. Someone who builds and runs indoor farms — agriculture and plant engineering. It needs someone who knows plants and someone who knows lamps and pipes, together.
4. Someone who builds machines that pull carbon from the air — chemical engineering. A seat that gains its purpose the moment power gets cheap.
5. Someone who returns freed land to forest — forestry and ecological restoration.

The fifth line is the unexpected seat. Even when surplus energy frees the farmland, that land does not become a good forest by itself. Someone must know which trees to plant where, and what to bring back first so the rest follows. In the other pieces of this series the last person in the chain was the one doing the cooling; in this one it is the person holding a spade. Forestry departments and landscaping certificates are the path. On the day fusion succeeds, this will be among the first jobs to get busy.

So

Abundant energy does not make problems vanish; it swaps them for others. Where the electricity bill was, the problems of materials, heat and land move in. Copper is still scarce, used energy still becomes heat, and forests still need people to bring them back.

One thing is clear, though. Half the environmental technologies we cannot afford are blocked not by ignorance but by the price of power, and that half unlocks all at once on the day energy gets cheap. Of the three answers on the broadcast, restoring nature was the nearest to right — only the method differs. Not mending the forest with energy, but erasing the reasons for cutting it.

The question that remainsOn the day energy becomes ten times cheaper, which job disappears first, and which appears first?