Research on space science, astronomy, and high-energy particles has produced incred­ibly detailed knowledge of our environment on both macroscopic and microscopic scales. It has been a long journey for Homo Sapiens to have evolved from simple food gathering to these intellectual heights. This knowledge, however, will be of little com­fort if we cannot find the means to assure the preservation of our species.

We have benefited from the discoveries made by adventurers driven by the urge to explore the unknown and to reach the inaccessible, even at great risk or expense. Magellan, Columbus, Roald Amundsen, Edmund Hillary, Roger Bannister,

Neil Armstrong… One climbs Mt. Everest because it is there. To shrink from pursuing the goal of unlimited energy borders on cowardice.

We close on a philosophical note. We have been incredibly lucky. Our planet settled at just the right distance from the sun so that H2O, a very stable molecule, is in liquid form most of the time, forming the basis for life. As plant life lived and died, its fossils lay buried for millennia as human life developed. This legacy of fossil energy allowed humans to form a civilization and develop brains that could think abstractly and explore our surroundings and the whole universe. Our intel­lectual capacity grew to such an extent that we could design and make computers that someday can do the thinking for us. The energy source that allowed all this to happen will soon be depleted; but, luckily, we now have the smarts to create our own energy source. But do we have the wisdom to actually do it?

[1] For instance, C. Seife, Sun in a Bottle, The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (Viking Books, 2008).

[2] Numbers in superscripts indicate Notes and square brackets [] indicate References at the end of this chapter.

F. F. Chen, An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet,

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7820-2_2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

[3]Numbers in superscripts indicate Notes and square brackets [] indicate References at the end of this chapter.

F. F. Chen, An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet,

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7820-2_3, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

This is a little complicated because “$1 per watt” refers to watts, which are not units of energy. We have to take into account that kilowatts give instanta­neous power, while electricity costs are given in units of kilowatt-hours, which are energy units. A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy generated by a 1-kW source of energy in an hour.

As deduced earlier, one peak kW of solar power yields an annual average of about 200 W as sunlight varies from day to night and summer to winter. This is the same as saying that the Peak-Equivalent Hours per Day is about five. So at $1 per peak watt, 1 kW of peak power would cost $1,000; and

[5] kW of average power would cost about five times as much or $5,000. For this much investment, how many kilowatt-hour do we get? Well, that depends on the life of a solar cell. There are 8,766 hours in a year; and if we assume a lifetime of 20 years for the cells, they will last about 175,000 h. Dividing $5,000 by this, the cost of solar electricity would be $0.03/kWh, compared with $0.10/kWh for average electricity cost in the USA in 2009,34

[6]Numbers in superscripts indicate Notes and square brackets [] indicate References at the end of this chapter.

F. F. Chen, An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet,

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7820-2_4, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

[7] Numbers in superscripts indicate Notes and square brackets [] indicate References at the end of this chapter.

F. F. Chen, An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet,

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7820-2_6, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011