The global military spending
2400 billion dollars.
This is how much the world spends every year on armaments.
Many of you will say: "Here he goes again with the criticisms of the system!".
You must forgive me, but somehow I need to vent because my brain refuses to accept absurd situations devoid of any basic logic. I do this on my blog, my personal space, so you are free not to read. Please don't hold it against me.
The incipit, the starting point of my reflection is the following...
How can one decide, in 2026, to spend hundreds of billions of euros on wars?
It seems that humanity has at some point stopped to go backward. Sometimes I wonder if we are really that evolved, if our species has truly learned anything from history.
War in Ukraine, from 2022 to today, Western countries have provided about 360 billion dollars in aid. Russia, on the other hand, has spent 149 billion dollars a year on war and defense.
War with Iran, much more recent, in the early days of operations, about 11 billion dollars have already been spent. Just the first 100 hours of attacks cost 3.7 billion dollars. Some analyses speak of about 1 billion dollars a day for military operations.
Only in 2023, global military spending (not only wars but also defense) exceeded 2400 billion dollars in just one year!
The cost of wars compared to scientific research
These are gigantic figures, and yet, if we look at the history of scientific research, we discover a surprising thing: the great technological revolutions have cost much less than the wars that destroy the planet.
The Apollo program that took man to the Moon cost about 25 billion dollars in the 1960s, equivalent to about 250 billion today. If we compare it with global military spending, it would be possible to finance 10 Apollo operations a year.
Towards the depletion of oil
Towards the depletion of oil
For years now, there has been talk of a total and irreversible transition to electric: in the automotive sector first and gradually in many other areas of daily life. Just think of induction cooktops in home kitchens, electric bicycles, electric scooters, heat pumps for home heating, electric urban buses, trains powered exclusively by electricity, electric trucks for logistics, and even the first prototypes of electric airplanes currently in the testing phase.
The transition to electric in most sectors has a very important starting point: the fight against climate change. The goal is to reduce CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases by gradually replacing technologies based on the combustion of fossil fuels with systems powered by electricity, potentially produced from low-emission sources. It is clear that if we have to burn oil or coal to produce electricity, we are only shifting the problem from the automotive sector to the global energy sector.
Some say that climate change is a hoax
However, beyond political opinions or media statements, the scientific data accumulated over the last few decades indicates a rather clear trend: the global average temperature is rising and the planet's natural systems to compensate for the rise in temperature are showing increasingly evident signs of stress.
The melting of glaciers, the reduction of polar ice caps, the rise in average sea levels, and the increased frequency of extreme weather events are phenomena observed and documented by numerous international research centers. Even though the Earth's climate system is extremely complex and subject to natural variability, the scientific community agrees that human activity, particularly the massive emission of greenhouse gases, is significantly contributing to global warming.
Therefore, I do not know which planet Mr. Trump lives on when he defines climate change as a "Hoax" or "Con Job", but on planet Earth, the real situation is this and it is evident to everyone, without the need to be a scientist.
This image shows NASA's measurements from September 1984 and September 2016, and now the situation has further worsened. Data released from his house and not "Invented by the Chinese to make US manufacturing uncompetitive".
Anyway, regardless of the political debate, there is still an objective fact: the demand for electricity is set to increase enormously in the coming decades. The electrification of transport, domestic heating, industry, and many other sectors will require a production capacity much larger than the current one.
This is where the real problem emerges. It is not enough to talk about energy transition, we need to ask ourselves and solve a much higher problem...
Where will all this energy come from?
From nuclear power plants, there is no alternative!
The issue of nuclear energy in Italy
The debate on nuclear energy in Italy is inevitably linked to the referendums of 1987 and 2011, which led to the abandonment of nuclear production in our country. These are political decisions that I consider ABSURD, made through the referendum tool, that is, through popular vote.
I believe that for a person to seriously make a voting decision on nuclear energy, they must have at least a basic knowledge of nuclear physics and the long-term energy implications. With all due respect to a baker, I strongly doubt they know or want to know the theoretical foundations of nuclear physics behind the operation of a fission power plant.
I also ask you if that referendum, seasoned with media and psychological terrorism based on the Chernobyl disaster, had even the slightest sense of existence. How can you express a preference if you don't even know what you are talking about? Nuclear energy production is an extremely technical issue that requires advanced skills in nuclear physics, energy engineering, materials science, and industrial safety. How can you reduce such a complex decision to a simple emotional choice, especially in historical contexts heavily influenced by the Chernobyl incident of 1986? To then delegate the purchase of this energy to France, which produces it with nuclear power plants... One must truly be a certified fool!
However, it is necessary to clarify, otherwise we are just talking. In those years, the public debate was inevitably marked by fear. However, to truly understand what is being discussed when talking about nuclear energy, it is necessary to start from a fundamental question...
How does a nuclear fission power plant work
How a nuclear fission power plant works
All the nuclear power plants currently operating in the world (about 200 with a total of 416 active reactors) are based on nuclear fission. I will tell you in advance that a fission nuclear power plant is nothing more than a thermoelectric plant (simply a steam plant) in which the heat source is not the chemical combustion of fossil fuels but the energy released from a controlled nuclear reaction.
The fuel used is generally enriched uranium containing a significant percentage of the fissile isotope uranium-235. When a slow neutron strikes the nucleus of uranium-235, it becomes unstable, splits into two lighter nuclei, releasing a huge amount of energy in the form of heat, radiation, and secondary neutrons. The released neutrons can in turn strike other uranium-235 nuclei, generating a chain reaction. In an atomic bomb, this reaction proceeds uncontrollably, while in a nuclear reactor, it is maintained in steady conditions thanks to a control system based on neutron-absorbing materials such as boron or cadmium inserted in the form of control rods into the reactor core.
Inside the reactor, there is also a moderator, often water or graphite, whose task is to slow down the neutrons produced by fission, bringing them to the so-called thermal energy at which the probability of triggering new fissions significantly increases.
The heat generated by fission is transferred to a coolant, in most reactors this liquid is simply pressurized water, which carries the thermal energy to a heat exchanger where steam is produced. This steam under pressure drives a turbine connected to an alternator, just like in conventional thermoelectric plants. From an engineering point of view, therefore, a nuclear power plant is essentially a thermodynamic machine that converts thermal energy into mechanical energy and subsequently into electrical energy according to the principles of the Rankine cycle. The fundamental difference compared to coal or gas plants is that the energy density of nuclear fuel is enormously higher. One kilogram of uranium, subjected to fission, can release millions of times more energy than one kilogram of fossil fuel, and this explains why relatively small amounts of nuclear fuel can power a reactor for long periods of time.
Some curiosities to define the orders of magnitude
A human being, throughout their life, consumes roughly a few hundred thousand kWh of electricity. To produce them, it takes an amount of U-235 on the order of a few tens of grams (from 16 to 27 grams), the equivalent of the volume of a walnut.
Nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion: the future of energy
Even more interesting from an energy perspective is nuclear fusion, which represents the physical process that fuels stars (including our Sun, of course). In this case, it is not about splitting heavy nuclei but about fusing light nuclei such as deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. When these nuclei come close enough to overcome the Coulomb repulsion between their positive charges, they can fuse to form a helium nucleus and release a high-energy neutron along with an extraordinary amount of energy.
The technological problem of fusion lies in the fact that to achieve these conditions, the fuel must be brought to temperatures on the order of tens or hundreds of millions of degrees, temperatures at which matter no longer exists in solid, liquid, or gaseous states but in an ionized state called plasma. Plasma cannot be contained by traditional materials and must be confined using extremely intense magnetic fields, as is done in tokamak or stellarator-type reactors. The goal of international research is to achieve a condition called "ignition," that is, a regime in which the energy produced by fusion reactions exceeds that required to maintain the plasma confined and stable.
In recent years, however, research on fusion has made progress that until recently seemed distant. Several laboratories around the world have managed to maintain stable fusion plasmas for increasingly longer times and to reach conditions increasingly close to those necessary for the ignition of the self-sustaining reaction. An emblematic example is represented by experiments conducted on large experimental tokamaks such as the European JET or the Chinese experimental reactor EAST, where confined plasmas have been achieved at temperatures on the order of hundreds of millions of degrees maintained for tens of seconds. In parallel, in the United States, the National Ignition Facility achieved a historic result in 2022 by demonstrating for the first time in the laboratory a condition of net energy gain in inertial confinement fusion, that is, a situation in which the energy released by the fusion reaction exceeds that transferred to the fuel via the laser system.
These results do not yet represent an industrial solution to the energy problem, but they demonstrate that the limits of fusion are not of a theoretical nature, but rather engineering. The physics governing the process has been understood for decades, while the real challenges concern the ability to build machines capable of maintaining the plasma stable for long periods, managing high-energy neutron flows, and developing materials capable of withstanding extreme conditions of temperature and radiation. In other words, the problem is no longer to understand whether fusion is possible, but to build sufficiently advanced engineering systems to make it economically and industrially exploitable.
A comparison between fission power plants and future fusion power plants
At this point, it is also useful to clarify the substantial difference between nuclear energy from fission, currently used in all power plants worldwide, and that from fusion, which represents a future technological prospect.
One of the most relevant differences concerns the nature and quantity of waste produced. In fission reactors, the spent fuel contains highly radioactive fission products and transuranic isotopes that can have very long decay times and therefore require long-term geological management and storage systems. In fusion, however, the direct product of the reaction is helium, a stable and non-radioactive gas. High-energy neutrons can induce activation phenomena in the structural materials of the reactor, but these are generally induced radioactivity with much shorter decay times compared to the fission products typical of traditional reactors.
Another element of comparison concerns the energy density and potential energy of the fuel. Fission also has an extraordinarily high energy density compared to chemical fuels, but fusion presents even more extreme values. The amount of energy released per unit mass in the deuterium-tritium reaction is greater than that obtained from the fission of uranium and millions of times greater than that produced by typical chemical reactions of fossil fuels. This means that very small amounts of fuel can produce enormous amounts of electrical energy once the technology becomes industrially feasible.
Another point of comparison concerns the availability of raw materials. Fission power plants depend on the mining of uranium and the subsequent isotopic enrichment process, activities that require complex industrial infrastructures and are linked to the availability of specific mineral deposits. In the case of fusion, however, the main fuel consists of isotopes of hydrogen. Deuterium is naturally present in seawater and can be extracted through relatively simple isotopic separation processes. Considering the volume of the Earth's oceans, the amount of deuterium available represents a practically inexhaustible energy reserve on a civilizational scale. Tritium, necessary for the reaction, can also be produced within the reactor through nuclear reactions involving lithium, an element relatively abundant in the Earth's crust.
The difference between these two energy models is therefore not only technological but also systemic. Fission has already demonstrated its ability to sustain stable and large-scale electricity production, but it remains tied to the management of long-term waste and the availability of fissile fuel. Fusion, if and when it reaches industrial maturity, promises instead a combination of extremely high energy density, practically unlimited fuel availability, and a significant reduction in problems related to nuclear waste. In this sense, fusion represents one of the most interesting candidates to address the global energy problem in the long term, especially in a historical context in which the global demand for electricity is set to increase drastically due to the progressive electrification of transport, industry, and heating systems.
The overall picture
If we look at the overall picture, a paradox emerges that is hard to ignore. On one hand, humanity continuously discusses climate crisis, energy transition, and electrification of the global economy. On the other hand, it continues to allocate colossal amounts of economic resources to the production of armaments and the financing of conflicts. Global military spending now exceeds two trillion dollars every year, a figure that alone would be enough to multiply by many orders of magnitude the investments in advanced energy research.
This imbalance is not the result of a technological or scientific limit, but of a cultural and political choice. The physics governing fission has been known for almost a century, and that governing fusion for over half a century. The obstacles that remain to be overcome are primarily engineering: plasma stability, neutron flow management, radiation-resistant structural materials, and the development of efficient systems for heat extraction and electricity production.
The timelines often cited for commercial fusion reflect more the pace of investments than a scientific limit. With current levels of global public funding, which hover around a few billion dollars a year, many research programs estimate that the first demonstration reactors capable of producing electricity from nuclear fusion could appear around the middle of the century, between 2045 and 2060. The international ITER project, currently under construction in southern France, represents one of the fundamental steps in this path and should demonstrate in the coming decades the feasibility of a fusion plasma capable of producing thermal powers on the order of 500 megawatts.
However, if one imagines a scenario in which fusion becomes a global strategic priority and receives investments comparable to those allocated to military spending or major technological programs of the past, the perspective could change radically. Hundreds of billions of euros a year would allow for the simultaneous construction of dozens of experimental reactors, drastically accelerate research on advanced materials, develop next-generation magnetic confinement systems, and significantly reduce the development times of industrial prototypes.
With current funding levels, many scientific programs estimate that the first operational fusion power plants could appear around the middle of the century. However, if investments on the order of hundreds of billions of euros a year were directed towards this sector, the timing could change radically. In a scenario of scientific and industrial mobilization comparable to that of the major technological programs of the twentieth century, the realization of the first prototypes of fusion power plants could plausibly occur within a decade, not in fifty years.
This brings us to the central question that no longer concerns nuclear physics or plasma engineering, but the cultural maturity of modern societies.
The scientific knowledge to develop revolutionary energy technologies already exists. Scientists and engineers are ready to work on it. What is lacking is not the technical ability but the political choice to allocate resources towards building the future instead of destruction.
Ultimately, therefore, the real limit is not technological but cultural. A civilization that can afford to spend thousands of billions on war but not a few hundred on energy shows that the real problem is not technological. It is cultural.
