A Coming Worse Pollution?

Rongqing Dai

“….when the public embraces those achievements of science and technology as miracles and longs for the coming of the next ones, people often ignore one sad fact that as the ancient dreams come true, their potential negative social impacts could also become true.”

----The Red Hat [[1]]

Historical experience has shown time and again that when it comes to the issue of damaging the earth's environment, the scientists of this world have often been swift in doing it but slow in regretting the consequence. This is a sad fact in the history of industrialization when it is supposed to (and does) benefit the mankind.

A few centuries ago, when the first industrial revolution began, scientists had no idea at all that carbon dioxide, a trace gas in the atmosphere, would one day be the subject of worldwide emissions control. But now when the world is crying out about too much carbon dioxides in the atmosphere, scientists once again are working very hard by spending billions of dollars in something that could potentially be the preparation for another round of future air pollution, a possibly much worse kind of pollution than the carbon dioxides, without seemingly aware of it.

Today a hot scientific headline is the global competition in rushing to make fusion power plants. Several scientific groups have optimistically predicted that they would make some breakthrough in achieving net power output with their fusion power generators.

However, it is well known that the process of fusion power generation is turning deuterium from the ocean to helium in the atmosphere [[2]].

While scientists are claiming that helium is a harmless clean gas they seem to have forgotten also to tell us the following facts about it:

As the second most abundant gas in our four-dimensional universe, helium is almost impossible to eliminate from nature. Compared with carbon dioxide, helium is not only too light to be comfortably collected, but also too inert to be absorbed through chemical means; accordingly, there is no natural process in Earth's nature that can break down helium, as photosynthesis does with carbon dioxide.

Although currently the normal concentration of helium in the atmosphere is only 5ppm, and scientists claim that only a very small amount of deuterium will be used at any moment for the fusion reaction, they seem to forget the might of global industrial mass production is not the experimental scale in their labs can match at all. Besides, they seem also forget the famous Jevons paradox [[3]] which tells that industrial production itself would greatly boost the desire of consuming of the products! Plus, there is no natural process to reduce the concentration of helium as photosynthesis does with carbon dioxide.

Given the difficulty of eliminate helium from nature, in case decades from now we find out that the atmosphere is filled with helium pollution as the result of the scientific community's own obsession of the advanced technology, it may not be as easy to fix as reducing carbon emissions is today.