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This is an entry for the STEM contest being run by stemgeeks and @themarkymark. You can join the STEM contest fun here!

We live in pretty exciting times, the forward march of science and technology has been on a steep upwards climb (how is that for mixed metaphors..) since the Enlightenment... and every year now brings us new concepts and ideas and gadgets which would have been completely unbelievable just a single decade ago. In fact, there are many of us who have lived through several stages of exponential development in technology and scientific knowledge already.

However, to enable (power.... ha ha) the application of abstract theory to practical prototypes and then to widespread usage of technology... you need power. Let's be honest, the current energy generation situation for the Earth is not particularly modern nor sustainable. We rely on centuries old methods of generating base-load power (burning stuff chemically...) that have low energy efficiency and a huge environmental cost, coupled with a finite supply of fuel. This is an unsustainable situation... we will need more energy for the future, and fossil fuels are just not going to cut it.

Clean Coal and other fossil fuels adaptations (or alternate burn stuff fuels) aren't really a solution. The problem is still one of kicking the can down the road (burying the pollution...) or more critically, finite and diminishing resources and the low energy conversion efficiency.

We do have some current "green" alternatives, such as wind and solar, which are perfect for low level and local power generation... however, transmission and storage are still a bit of a problem. These problems can be solved by better batteries (power density is not great at the moment with the current breed of Lithium Ion batteries) or gravity storage (aka. big dams with pumped water storing the energy as potential energy). However, the problem remains that the infrastructure and batteries have their own environmental footprint to construct, and if your base load is still fossil-fuel... then you are making a bit of a dent in the reduction of pollution.

Another alternative is fission reactors... which in the public mind has been completely and utterly poisoned as a viable source of energy generation. Well, on this topic... if it isn't popular, then it won't be built.... I don't think I would know a single politician or company that is willing to commit public hari-kiri on proposing this... however, politics aside, despite being gently pro-fission (or more accurately, more pro-fission than pro-fossil fuel), I had read some ideas that address the probabilities over the long term of poisoned land (not good...) and the lack of other limiting resources required for the fission power plant build (more of an economic consideration). You can find the public news reporting of this at Phys.org, here and here, with the IEE article here and Journal article here.

Enter Fusion

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Well... it has been a bit of a joke that Fusion has always been just a decade away... so, I could have re-used this contest entry countless times already... and possibly (I hope not...) for the coming decades of contests!

The development of commercial Fusion reactors to provide the base-load of humanity's energy requirements would be a gigantic breakthrough. As technology has marched on, we have become more and more energy hungry... for a while this didn't matter, we burnt more things and everything seemed okay. Now, we realise that there are costs to doing that, however, with little room for developing new technologies for energy generation... we've moved to energy efficiency instead. This is also a great goal, but t doesn't address the issue of power generation.

Fission is the act of splitting heavy (heavier than Iron) atoms and recovering Kinetic Energy from the mass deficit between the starting ingredients and end products, and it generates orders of magnitude more energy than simple chemical combustion (fossil fuels)... but it does has the unfortunate side effect (if you are trying to generate energy, not if you are trying to blow up a city...) of having quite radioactive and long-lived daughter isotopes (some of which are chemically similar to elements like Calcium and thus get absorbed into the food supply).

Fusion is the reverse process, whereby you join light atoms (Hydrogen/Helium for the best bang for the buck!) and recover Kinetic Energy from the mass deficit. It is the process that powers the Sun, produces orders of magnitudes more energy than Fission and produces no (little) radioactive waste. Perfect, except the catch is it is hard to do on a controlled scale... building a Fusion bomb is easy, you trigger it with a Fission bomb... but that doesn't work so well for a power plant... at least, not one that I would like to live next to (or on the same continent....!)

At research level, Fusion power has passed breakeven points... unfortunately, it is on a scale that would struggle to power a LED light. However, the fact that is possible gives great hope for the future... after, big things start with small steps! Currently, the two leading ideas on how to generate are Inertial Confinement (blasting a Hydrogen pellet on all sides with Lasers) or Plasma Confinement (using magnetic fields to constrain a super hot plasma.). Both have inherent advantages and disadvantages, Plasma Confinement is tricky due to the fact that the plasma doesn't behave and keeps slipping out... and Inertial Confinement, well, the lasers need to be perfectly balanced or you don't get the pellet being crushed, just being pushed...).

Conclusion

If these techniques for Fusion power generation are mastered, refined and developed into a commercial power plant (currently, they are expensive, too big and don't produce anywhere near enough power)... humanity's power requirements and ecological footprint problem (from energy generation) will be solved. With an excess of power would also come the ability to power future technologies, and perhaps even revolutionise complete sectors that were previously power constrained.

This is it.... you can have all the technological advances in the world, but if you don't have the energy generation to power it without killing your environment... well, you may as well NOT have had anything. Feels like Christmas really... lots of new toys... but no batteries!

PS: I have simplified a lot of the concepts here in this article for the ease of a layperson's reading... don't flame (plasma....) me!