Rongqing Dai
Historical experience has shown time and again that when it comes to the issue of damaging the earth's environment, the scientists of this world have often been swift in doing it but slow in regretting the consequence. This is a sad fact in the history of industrialization when it is supposed to (and does) benefit the mankind.
A few centuries ago, when the first industrial revolution began, scientists had no idea at all that carbon dioxide, a trace gas in the atmosphere, would one day be the subject of worldwide emissions control. But now when the world is crying out about too much carbon dioxides in the atmosphere, scientists once again are working very hard by spending billions of dollars in something that could potentially be the preparation for another round of future air pollution, a possibly much worse kind of pollution than the carbon dioxides, without seemingly aware of it.
Today a hot scientific headline is the global competition rushing to make fusion power plants possible. Several scientific groups have optimistically predicted that they would make some breakthrough in achieving net power output with their fusion power generators.
However, it is well known that the process of fusion power generation is turning deuterium from the ocean to helium in the atmosphere [[1]].
While scientists are claiming that helium is a harmless clean gas they seem to have forgotten also to tell us the following facts about it:
As the second most abundant gas in our four-dimensional universe, helium is pretty much impossible to eliminate from nature. Compared with carbon dioxide, helium is not only too light to be comfortably collected, but also too inert to be absorbed through chemical means; accordingly, there is NO natural process in Earth's nature that can turn helium into gases good for human health, as photosynthesis does with carbon dioxide.
As an asphyxiant gas, despite its current harmless status in nature, the accumulative effect of diluting oxygen and nitrogen in earth atmosphere in large quantity could be severely pernicious decades later if it happens at a fast pace.
The most worrisome aspect of constantly turning the deuterium of our seawater into helium in the atmosphere is that the process is basically irreversible, that is to say the end results are accumulated monotonically. With this natural logic, the dilution of oxygen and nitrogen concentrations in the atmosphere by helium could be negligible if the concentration of helium grows at a negligible pace, or threatening if the concentration of helium grows at a threatening pace.
Although currently the normal concentration of helium in our atmosphere is only 5ppm, and scientists claim that only a very small amount of deuterium will be used at any moment for the fusion reaction, they seem to forget that the might of global industrial mass production is not the experimental scale in their labs can match at all. Besides, they seem also to forget the famous Jevons paradox [[2]] which tells that industrial production itself would greatly beef up the desire of consuming of the products and thus further greatly boost the production! Plus, there is NO natural process to reduce the concentration of helium as photosynthesis does with carbon dioxide.
Given the difficulty of eliminate helium from nature, in case decades from now we find out that the atmosphere is filled with helium pollution as the result of the scientific community's own obsession of the advanced technology and their own fame, it may not be as easy to fix as reducing carbon emissions is today.
“….when the public embraces those achievements of science and technology as miracles and longs for the coming of the next ones, people often ignore one sad fact that as the ancient dreams come true, their potential negative social impacts could also become true.”
----The Red Hat [[3]]
[[1]] ITER, “Fuelling the Fusion Reaction”. Retrieved from: https://www.iter.org/sci/FusionFuels
[[2]] Wikipedia. “Jevons paradox”. Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
[[3]] Dai, R. (2018). “Prologue of The Red Hat”. Retrieved from: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46021/the-red-hat.
