Robert Brockway - Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

Well, lucky for the planet, science is about to change all that and make green energy as sexy and dangerous as she is renewable and clean. It’s just that it may be at the expense of all of our lives.

At the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England, a group of scientists is refining designs for a new energy facility they call HiPER (high power laser energy research). This facility, apart from proving that scientists cheat at acronyms (if you’re being fair about it, it should be HPLER, but “Hipler” apparently isn’t sexy enough, sounding more like Adolf’s rap alias than a high-tech research center), may also solve the world’s growing energy crisis in the most awesome way that science knows how…

With lasers!

The HiPER facility is pursuing the heretofore presumed pipe dream of nuclear fusion, which they hope to achieve by using a combination of hydrogen and superlasers. The idea is to build a superefficient, giant, rapid-fire laser—not for world domination or eliminating that bastard James Bond, but to superheat a tiny little pellet of hydrogen. The hydrogen would be dropped down a 33-foot concrete and lithium shaft, where, upon reaching the dead center of the reaction chamber, it would be struck with 192 separate lasers, the combined output of which would be 500 trillion watts (or one thousand times the power of the entire U.S. national electricity grid) delivered all at once. This creates temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius in the hydrogen pellet, thus replicating the same fusion process that powers our sun. Tubes of water surrounding the chamber superheat from the reaction, the steam is converted into electricity, and hydrogen pellets learn never to cross mankind again.

You see that, hippies? That’s how you fucking do green energy. Maybe some people won’t trade horsepower and performance for mileage, but even if it tops out at 16 mph, comes in only bright pink, and the engine sounds like Tiny Tim singing Hello Kitty songs, there’s still not a man alive who wouldn’t drive an electric car powered by goddamn laser fusion . All right, so maybe that’s not strictly true: The laser fusion would be converted to electricity in a separate station rather than the actual car itself, but hell, even lasers by proxy is more lasers than you have right now. Let me throw a little bit of complicated math at you to explain why that’s a beneficial development:

• Whiskey

• Punches

• Pulling it with your dick

If “lasers” = “good,” then “more lasers” = “gooder.”

Clearly, the logic is infallible.

Though this technology isn’t quite feasible yet, it is close: Technicians at the National Ignition Facility, part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, while typically busy having the most badass job titles in the history of everything, are also spending their time carrying out early versions of the experiment right now, and eventually hope to combine their efforts with the new HiPER facility to create a viable electrical grid.

A few worrisome things about this process, however, are the temperatures and pressures created: Akin to a tiny, controlled sun, remember? So, how much of an issue is containment? The process has already been proven viable by the National Ignition Facility, and they’re planning to scale up to a larger form when the HiPER facility is built, yet little is said of containing this energy in the event of a failure. Forgive me for being a tad bit worried when somebody borrows a plot point from a comic book supervillain’s best-laid revenge schemes just to power their home, but creating a miniature sun on the surface of the Earth seems like the God King of bad ideas. After all, back in the ’40s there were rumblings that the first nuclear tests would ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere, leading to a global chain reaction that would, in turn, ignite all of the air on Earth—and they still went ahead with testing the bombs.

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I hope this kind of thing helps you see why trust is still an issue, Science. Seeing as how you risked lighting our lungs on fire just to build a better bomb, I don’t know if we as a people are ready to let you penetrate our pristine, virginal electrical grids with your hot, throbbing lasers. It might just be too soon to go all the way with you; at least prove you’re not going to strangle us for kicks afterward.

Even assuming that the fusion lasers don’t get us, there’s also a new experiment in alternative power under way in Canada. It’s called the AVE, which is short for Atmospheric Vortex Engine (Note: That’s how you do acronyms, scientists. The pseudobiblical tones succeed in scaring the shit out of us with three little letters alone), and it’s got the scientific community in a whirl.

Well, more like a whirlwind.

Actually, exactly like a whirlwind.

That’s what the AVE is, after all: a giant, artificial tornado, reaching up to ten kilometers straight into the atmosphere. Like slapping a leash on a volcano, the AVE proposes to literally tame a natural disaster by creating and controlling its point of origin, then harnessing the resultant power. The principles it functions on are pretty straightforward: Tornados are formed by cool and warm air mixing in sufficient quantities. So it’s really just a simple matter of forcing the warm air upward far enough to contact the cool air above… and then attempting to harness a force of nature that has killed human beings and destroyed cities since the beginning of time.

Listen: Canadians are great—national health care, clean cities, a very polite disposition—but there’s a limit to how much faith Americans can have in their neighbors up north, and literally reaping the whirlwind might be a little beyond that.

• Politeness

• Hockey

• Syrup

• Basketball

• “Yo momma” jokes

• Starting wars

• Wrangling tornadoes

Assuming they don’t immediately bring forth the wrath of God for usurping his powers, a ring of turbines on the ground would both maintain ideal tornado conditions (perpetually pumping warm air in a circular motion) and also do double duty in harvesting all that energy, just like windmills. The AVE generating facility would be a low, squat building surrounding a giant cylindrical tube that’s open to the sky. The artificial tornado would emanate from this tube, with only the lower part contained by the structure. Essentially, the large, flat ring and containment wall would look like the stand of a trophy, with the trophy itself being a several-kilometers-high twister. If it helps you to picture it, just think of it as a giant award for World’s Scariest Building.

Its inventor, Canadian scientist Louis Michaud, says the AVE would also serve to stabilize the localized weather around it—maybe even facilitating rainfall by assisting the transportation of ground moisture to cloud level.

Win, win, and win, right? Farmers get drought protection, the world gets energy, and metalheads get a new thing to watch instead of laser light shows!

At its heart, it’s the same principle as conventional wind farms, and those seem pretty quaint and harmless, right? The chief difference here is that conventional wind farms consist of giant pinwheels in rolling green fields capturing the essence of a gentle summer breeze, while the AVE is a gargantuan black tower in the center of a dry lakebed in Utah topped by a giant, artificial, eternal typhoon. You read correctly. This isn’t mere theory. There is actually a working prototype of the AVE. It was built solely as a proof of concept, so the whirlwind it generates is not kilometers high and the energy it reaps is insignificant, but it does work! The rest of it is just a matter of scale now. Oh, and just to mix things up a bit, the experimental AVE tower is also used to generate something called Fire Spirals, presumably just in case Harry Potter tries to meddle in your whole “eternal whirlwind” plan.