As dreams of renewable green energy fade, along with electric car batteries that freeze in winter, explode in summer and cannot conveniently take you as far as you might want to go without a long refill that may or may not be available, and with windmills and solar panels that are dependent upon wind and sun when there might be much of either, the future keeps looking better and better for long-lasting, totally clean nuclear fusion energy – if and when it can be developed. Increasingly, people are starting to see nuclear fusion as the wave of the future for both affordable energy and "saving the planet" from being overrun by pollutants.
One small reactor in your car could enable it to travel for "a million kilometers" – quite different from trying to find a charging station while crossing a desert.
The good news is that entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman are already exploring how to capture this new magic fuel so that it can be put to use immediately. To that end, they are reportedly building small nuclear reactors in Nevada.
The bad news is that Communist China is developing them, already using them to fuse atoms at unimaginably high temperatures inside a device called a tokamak. They have been working in fusion atoms for energy this way for years while continuing to open at least two "dirty" coal plants every week, evidently just make sure they have their bases covered while they perfect nuclear fusion for commercial use.
Trump would do well to focus when his term officially starts next month, on the future of his new Trumponomics: a US tokamak that is superior to China's, should be a Trump "Manhattan Project," financed, with allocations from the House of Representatives as either a public-private partnership between the government and the private sector, or as a private IPO, or both. The goal would be to come up with a tokamak nuclear reactor better than China's that can generate enormous sustainable electric energy and propulsion - and a resultant boom in American economic growth.
This project must be, along with modernizing the US military, among President Trump's first orders of business as soon as he assumes office.
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
