As regular readers of this site may have noticed, Varius and I spent a large chunk of last year watching the news cycle like a pair of overcaffeinated neurotic hawks. In all that time, the single factor that hid in the background of almost every major topic was energy. Presidential candidates expounded on their policies for weaning Americans off of foreign-bought oil. Environmentalists sparred with oil, gas, and coal companies over the best ways to reduce carbon emissions from the usage of fossil fuels. Agriculture analysts worried about food shortages stemming from the increase in biofuel production. Technology buffs championed the gradual efficiency improvements in solar cells. Automakers were attacked for failing to make hybrid cars fast enough. Economists linked high gas prices to high everything else prices. In short, virtually every single fucking news story you heard last year related, in some way, to energy.

So will somebody please explain to me why, in all that time, I never heard anybody say anything about the Fusion Reactor they’ve been building in California for the last eleven years? And why, when the project is happening right here in the United States, I finally needed the British to tell me about it?

Last week, while researching articles on starving koalas and Barack Obama’s muscles, I found myself clicking through the online version of the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph. When I saw an article entitled, “Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star,” I immediately assumed that the project was going to be conducted at some prestigious European institution like CERN. But no! It’s actually happening at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California. What’s more, the NIF is on the grounds of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the U.S. keeps its nuclear weapons. This was all starting to sound rather ominous.

Luckily though, the “tiny man-made star” isn’t a new weapon. It’s a real live fusion reactor! As in, a power plant that mimics the processes that occur inside the Sun! Holy fuck!

No, I seriously mean it when I say “holy fuck,” because a fusion reactor is big league stuff; potentially far superior to today’s nuclear power plants. Your standard Twentieth Century nuclear power plant utilizes nuclear fission, which involves the breakdown of radioactive isotopes into smaller radioactive isotopes. A fissile chain reaction can produce enormous amounts of energy when harnessed; unfortunately, it also produces hazardous radioactive waste.

In contrast, nuclear fusion, as the name suggests, involves the fusion of two atoms into one. Specifically it’s “the process by which multiple like-charged atomic nuclei join together to form a heavier nucleus,” and in the case of the NIF’s reactor, hydrogen atoms are fused into helium atoms. Which is precisely what happens inside of a star. The process requires an enormous amount of energy, but when successful, the net energy gain is exponential. During a tour of the facility last November, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger explained the numbers thusly:

“The impact will unleash a burst of fusion energy up to 500 billion watts of power and, just to show you what this is, generating the power of the United States and multiply that by a thousand. So that’s what we are talking about, the energy this will create.”

Best of all, fusion reactions are carbon-free and don’t produce radioactive byproducts (theoretically, anyway). And if the fusion process succeeds in creating the predicted, “source of almost limitless energy,” it could put a welcome end to a lot of the arguments I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article.

The NIF is still in the process of calibrating the many lenses and mirrors that will align the 192 high-energy lasers needed to force the fusion reaction. Though the final pieces are now being put into place, the painstaking detail required in these calibrations could push the first test shot back to 2010. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that 2010 isn’t particularly far away anymore. And while I’m annoyed that it’s taken so long for me to find out about this, I have to acknowledge the wisdom of Beak editor Varius when he told me recently,

“The fact that I’m learning about it now, instead of 11 years ago when they started work on it, is even cooler, since it means I don’t have to sit around waiting for them to build the goddamn thing.”

So with the enormous potential of fusion energy, why hasn’t this project received more attention in the national media? I can only speculate, but my guess is that, unlike the coal plants, the NIF is spending their money on actual research, rather than on lobbyists.