(NEW YORK) — A woman and her son were killed after a tornado swept through a Louisiana town, officials said.
“A young boy was found deceased in a wooded area of Pecan Farms where his home was destroyed,” the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s office said in a statement.
The boy’s mother was later found a street away from the family’s home in Keithville, Louisiana, officials said. She was “located under debris caused by a tornado,” according to a statement.
The victims were not identified.
The tornado was one of at least 13 that touched down in four states — Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and Mississippi — overnight into Wednesday morning. At least five tornadoes were confirmed in north Texas.
More tornadoes were expected throughout the South on Wednesday, as the storm moves east.
First responders in Louisiana said they were continuing to search for other victims, although nobody else had been reported missing.
A man was also transported to a local hospital with injuries, officials said.
(NEWTON, Conn.) — Two days after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, then-President Barack Obama approached a podium to speak. Before him was a room of people in shock over what had occurred in their quiet Connecticut town.
On Dec. 14, 2012, a 20-year-old gunman walked into the school in Newtown and fatally shot 20 young students and six educators.
“Here in Newtown, I come to offer the love and prayers of a nation,” the president told the families and community members gathered.
Now, those precise words stand etched in stone, welcoming visitors to the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial, created in memory of those who lost their lives 10 years ago in the nation’s worst mass shooting at an elementary school.
The memorial took a decade to achieve, in part because of the meticulous process the memorial’s planning committee took to honor the victims and their families.
“We had one chance to get it right,” said Alan Martin, vice chairman of Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission. “So, we labored over the process of site selection and labored over the process of design selection. And we knew it had to be both a natural feeling, a gentle feeling, and it had to give people an opportunity to grieve.”
The memorial opened in November in advance of the anniversary. Planners and community leaders hope the site will commemorate the lives lost even as the debate over gun violence continues across the nation.
“We thought after Sandy Hook, this would make a difference in terms of responsible and reasonable gun control,” said Martin. “We really had hope that the world might change, the country might change.”
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, hundreds of temporary memorials sprung up all over town, flooding it with candles, flowers, teddy bears, toys and pictures. But town leaders decided the memorials couldn’t remain forever and decided to clear them by the end of 2013.
Recognizing the significance of those mementos, they chose to incinerate them into “sacred soil.” Today, that soil lives at the memorial beneath the plaque and granite stone marked with Obama’s words.
That year, the town’s council — known as the Board of Selectmen — decided to appoint a commission to figure out how best to design and build a permanent memorial to honor the lives lost. Twelve community members were appointed, including three parents who lost children, forming the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission.
Daniel Krauss, chairman of the commission, told ABC News the first question they were tasked with was, “Should a permanent memorial exist?”
After community conversations involving victims’ families, teachers, parents of students, paramedics and the general public, the answer was yes.
Krauss, along with the commission’s vice chairman Martin, said they tried to make decisions through consensus. Family input, Krauss said, was paramount but would not be the only aspect taken into consideration — they also needed a town vote to approve the $3.7 million project. Later, the State of Connecticut Bond Commission approved a $2.5 million grant which covered about 70% of costs.
After five years of site proposals and rejections, the trustees of the Boys Social and Athletic Club of Sandy Hook donated the current five-acre site, less than a mile away from the new Sandy Hook Elementary, which reopened in a brand-new building on the original property.
“You could hear them laughing and running and jumping,” Martin said, pointing out how close the memorial grounds are to the school’s playground. “When you hear the kids running…right through the trees, it’s amazing. And that’s part of the beauty of such a site.”
The commission selected a concept by Dan Affleck and Ben Waldo of SWA Design out of 188 submissions, determining that the designers’ concept fit in with their own. The planning guide stipulated “the memorial should not be physically imposing or ideologically overbearing, but through its simplicity should communicate the great depth of our loss.”
Affleck and Waldo envisioned a space that would grow with visitors over time, focusing on three primary features — a circle, path and tree — according to SWA. At the center of the memorial sits a granite basin with water, where a young sycamore was planted to symbolize the youth of children killed. Each victim’s name is engraved to the granite basin, where the water’s motions reflect a continuous energy between the living and the deceased. The paths surrounding allow visitors to choose their own route — symbolic for the journey of grief.
A mother of one of the victims visits daily, Martin said. Other family members of the victims attended the private dedication ceremony. And still, some are not comfortable visiting the memorial.
“We know some of the families would never come there,” said Martin. “Many will come here once, and many will come here whenever it is personal to them.”
Martin said the extensive process that led to the memorial holds lessons for communities in other places, such as Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two of their teachers were killed during a shooting at Robb Elementary School nearly seven months ago.
“We have gotten so many calls from people, from communities, that have had loss,” said Martin, “and people wanted to know our process. It was a slow, deliberate process. Every step of the way, we consulted with the families and we knew of sensitivity and deference.”
In Sandy Hook, as visitors depart the memorial on the same path they entered, they are once again reminded of the former president’s words from that Dec. 10 years ago: “I can only hope it helps for you to know that you’re not alone in your grief; that our world too has been torn apart; that all across this land of ours, we have wept with you.”
(WASHINGTON) — Survivors of last month’s Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, Colorado, will provide testimony on Wednesday at a House Oversight Committee hearing regarding anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, extremism and violence.
The hearing, according to organizers, will address the ways in which anti-LGBTQ legislation and rhetoric is rising — and may be fueling a rise in violence against LGBTQ Americans.
This year, Pride events, drag shows, LGBTQ-friendly medical institutions and more have all become prominent targets of violence, threats and protests.
Michael Anderson, the only Club Q bartender to survive the shooting, is expected to speak at the hearing along with injured club patron James Slaugh and his boyfriend, Jancarlos Dell Valle, and Mark Slaugh, James Slaugh’s brother who was also at the club that night.
“From Colorado Springs to my own district in New York City, communities across the country are facing a terrifying rise of anti-LGBTQI+ violence and extremism,” House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., said in a statement.
Maloney continued, “Make no mistake, the rise in anti-LGBTQI+ extremism and the despicable policies that Republicans at every level of government are advancing to attack the health and safety of LGBTQI+ people are harming the LGBTQI+ community and contributing to tragedies like what we saw at Club Q.”
More than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced at the state level in the last year, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
The suspect accused of killing five people in a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs is facing 305 charges, including first-degree murder, attempted murder and bias-motivated crimes. The suspect has not yet entered a plea.
Investigators and witnesses at the club have said the shooter opened fire as soon as they walked into Club Q around midnight on Nov. 19. Patrons at the venue then tackled and subdued them until police arrived, according to witnesses.
The mass shooting was being investigated as a hate crime.
(NEW YORK) — It was any mother’s worst nightmare. In April 2019, Kari Hoffmann witnessed a man toss her 5-year-old son over a third-floor balcony while shopping at a mall. As a result, her son suffered multiple life-threatening injuries including broken arms, a broken leg and skull fractures.
Three-and-a-half years later, after her son made a miraculous recovery, Hoffmann decided she was ready to share her story and spoke first to ABC News’ Good Morning America about the incident.
“I was frozen in time until I was able to speak, and now is the time that is right in our lives where we’ve done a lotta healing, where it’s time to move forward with the story of the miracle of Landen,” said Hoffmann.
Hoffmann had taken her son Landen and one of his friends to the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. She said they had just completed a parent-teacher conference day and were looking for a way to “celebrate” when a stranger approached them.
“We were just looking at the alligator at the Rainforest Café, and a stranger came up and was whispering to these two little boys. And I thought that he was gonna turn this alligator on for them,” said Hoffmann. “He snatched [Landen] and ran. And I was just frozen … It happened so fast. I screamed, ‘No!’ after he was already thrown.”
“I don’t even remember running down the escalators, but I was screaming the whole time, ‘No, Landen’s not gonna die,'” she added.
She said the incident quickly drew a crowd. All Hoffmann asked of them was to “pray.”
“I don’t care who was looking. If they were looking, I asked them to pray,” she said. “He’s got a heartbeat. He was breathing. We got in the ambulance, and right before they shut the door, he opened his eyes for a second.”
Hoffmann said that Landen was immediately rushed into emergency brain trauma surgery. Relatives gathered while her son was on the operating table, and they were all there when a doctor delivered the news: Her son was “going to be okay.”
“Listening to him breathing with the machine’s beeping was the best sound I’ve ever heard in my life,” said Hoffmann. “Because that meant he was alive.”
Landen was in the hospital for four months. Hoffmann said she would journal to keep track of her son’s recovery. She said he made it just in time to attend the first day of kindergarten that year, only five days after he was released from the hospital. Despite the triumph, Landen at first struggled with some behavioral issues, but has since re-learned “to follow the rules.”
In May 2019, Emmanuel Aranda, 24, pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder and was sentenced to 19 years in prison for the attack. Aranda, who was reportedly banned from the mall on two other instances, said that he was “looking for someone to kill” when he tossed Landen from the balcony.
Hoffmann said she’s forgiven Aranda because “it’s a decision that you have to make so that God can do what he needs to do in your life … and that was to save Landen.”
Last year, the Hoffmanns filed a lawsuit through their attorney Mark Briol against the Mall of America, claiming that the mall security should have prevented Aranda from entering the building. The lawsuit sought unspecified damages for Landen’s medical expenses.
On Dec. 5, the family’s attorneys announced that the lawsuit was confidentially settled and released a statement saying they were working together with Mall of America on policy changes to ensure a similar incident doesn’t happen again.
Good Morning America reached out to Mall of America for comment on the settlement, and the mall reiterated the joint statement with the family.
“Mall of America and the family have agreed to work together with a focus on safety, and already are jointly pursuing policy changes to existing trespass limits for violent criminals so as to give greater ability to preclude such persons from their premises,” said the statement, in part.
Now, Landen is 8 years old. He enjoys playing hockey and is looking forward to his birthday in January, his mother said.
“Angels caught him, there’s no denying it,” she told GMA. “Yes, he had injuries, and we had to live through all of this pain to get to the end. But sometimes God allows us to go through things to teach us something.”
An undated photo of the Atrevida II, the U.S. Coast Guard is searching for the sailboat and its crew Kevin Hyde and Joe DiTommasso. – U.S. Coast Guard
(NEW YORK) — Two men who went missing more than a week ago while sailing to Florida have been found safe, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
Kevin Hyde, 64, and Joe DiTommasso, 76, departed Cape May, New Jersey, late last month on their 30-foot sailboat, the Atrevida II, along with a pet dog, according to the Coast Guard. The pair was last seen aboard their boat as it left the Oregon Inlet in North Carolina’s Outer Banks on Dec. 3.
Family and friends contacted officials on Sunday after last speaking with the pair on that same day, prompting a search that included aircraft and vessels, the Coast Guard said.
The Atrevida II was located Tuesday afternoon approximately 214 miles east of Delaware, after the men waved down the tanker vessel Silver Muna, the Coast Guard said.
“The Atrevida II was found to be without fuel and power, rendering their radios and navigation equipment inoperable,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.
The two men and dog were brought aboard the tanker at 4:18 p.m. and evaluated by the vessel’s medical staff “with no immediate concerns,” the Coast Guard said. They will remain on the vessel until its next port of call in New York, where they will be transferred to a Coast Guard vessel for further evaluation and to be reunited with their family, the Coast Guard said.
According to officials, the pair left port at Cape May on Nov. 27 and was traveling to Marathon, Florida.
(NEW YORK) — A man was injured in an apparent shark attack at a Hawaii beach on Tuesday — the second such attack reported in the state in the past week, officials said.
The incident occurred Tuesday morning at Anaeho’omalu Bay on Hawaii’s Big Island, the state’s Department of Land and Natural Resources said.
A man in his mid-60s was taken to a local hospital following the encounter with a reported 12-foot tiger shark, the department said. It is not known if the victim was a local or a tourist.
The man was in serious condition after getting bitten on his hip and buttocks area, Honolulu ABC affiliate KITV reported.
“Additional warning signs have been put up at various resort properties in the area, as well as by ocean sports operators,” the Department of Land and Natural Resources said in a statement.
This is the second shark attack in the past week in the state. On Thursday, a 60-year-old woman from Washington state disappeared after witnesses, including her husband, reported she was attacked by a shark in Maui, officials said.
The woman was never found after a search of the area around Keawakapu Point in South Maui.
Shark attacks are rare. There were 73 unprovoked incidents recorded around the world last year, according to yearly research conducted by the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File. Six of them occurred in Hawaii.
(WASHINGTON) — LGBTQ families are celebrating after President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act Tuesday afternoon in a ceremony held on the White House South Lawn.
The act codifies protections for same-sex and interracial marriage by mandating that states recognize lawful unions performed in other states. It does not require states to issue marriage licenses for same-sex or interracial couples — currently those marriages are protected by the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges and 1967 Loving v. Virginia decisions — however, the new law would effectively prevent married same-sex and interracial couples from being denied the civil benefits granted to them now, should either of those decisions ever be rolled back.
The House of Representatives passed the bill by a margin of 258-169 on Thursday last week, after the Senate pushed the bill through in late November on a 61-36 vote, following months of negotiation, sending the proposed legislation, which received bipartisan support, to the president’s desk.
Thirty-nine House Republicans and 12 Senate Republicans joined Democrats in passing the measure.
Kent Love-Ramirez, who married his husband Diego Love-Ramirez in 2007 and then again in a legal ceremony in 2012, told “Good Morning America” they followed the bill as it moved through Congress over the past year, and on Tuesday applauded Biden’s signing of the act, calling it a “happy” development.
“It was reassuring to see how many Republican elected officials aligned with the Democrats to move this forward,” the Michigan resident added. “But it was equally discouraging to see how many opposed it. So, there’s certainly work to be done although we’re also very reassured by what we see happening in society — that our families are becoming more widely accepted — and frankly, a lot of elected officials just need to sort of catch up with what we’re already seeing in our daily lives in our communities.”
At the same time, Love-Ramirez said the act isn’t a complete package that ensures marriage equality for everyone.
“It’s definitely a moment to celebrate but it is not without its compromise,” the father of two said. “I always try to make clear that although this is a good moment, it’s not the end game, that there are still limitations and it is not full equality for families like ours.”
In addition to codifying some protections for same-sex and interracial couples, the Respect for Marriage Act also offers protections for religious groups who oppose those marriages, preventing them losing their tax-exempt status if they refuse services or goods to those couples.
Beth McDonough of Northwest Pennsylvania also praised the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act this week, while cautioning that she felt more still needed to be done to fully protect same-sex and interracial couples.
“I’m thrilled our country has come such a long way in a short amount of time regarding public opinion around same sex marriage, and I’m excited about the federal protections being put in place to protect existing marriages,” McDonough told “GMA” in an email.
“I think many people don’t realize that this still leaves LGBTQ+ couples who are seeking to get married vulnerable to being discriminated against within their state,” she added. “As far as we’ve come, we still have a long way to go in protecting the equal right of queer people to build families. Our culture is still saturated with the belief that there’s a very specific ‘right’ way marriage should look, and it’s important for us to keep pushing progress and normalizing the fact that there are many ways to form a family.”
Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ rights nonprofit based in St. Petersburg, hailed the act’s signing as a “hopeful step” and an “important piece of legislation at a time when LGBTQ children and parents are under relentless attack.”
“I think today is an important step in reinforcing that our families deserve the same protections that others take for granted,” Smith told “GMA.”
The act in particular specifically recognizes marriages like Smith’s, who is Black and is married to a white woman.
“As a lesbian in an interracial marriage, this is pretty important,” she said.
She continued, “The majority of Americans support marriage equality. The majority of Americans support LGBTQ rights, but I think it’s important that everybody wake up to this grueling cadre of domestic terrorists who wish to silence most people for whom this is not the most important daily issue of their lives and intimidate those with us for whom it is most important issue that affects our lives daily.”
Love-Ramirez said that for LGBTQ couples who aren’t yet married, like he and his husband are, there were likely still obstacles ahead.
“The compromise in the act, in terms of it [not obligating] states to perform same sex marriages, is not necessarily a concern for us, but we recognize it as a concern for people who are not yet married, who, if the Supreme Court overturns marriage equality, they’re still going to have to go out of state if they live in a state that doesn’t perform same sex marriages — and that’s appalling,” he said.
Love-Ramirez said he will continue advocating for others in the LGBTQ community until this “slow march” toward marriage equality is achieved.
“It’s a continuation of many steps that have brought us to this point because a lot of advocacy and advancements led us to this point,” he added. “So it’s one moment to celebrate on a long journey towards full equality.”
(NEW YORK) — In the last couple of days, hundreds of migrants have been trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, as the future of Title 42, the Trump-era border restriction ordered at the beginning of the pandemic, is in question.
ABC News’ Matt Rivers, who is at the border, spoke with “Start Here” Monday about the situation and how a possible repeal of the order next week could affect the rise in migrants.
START HERE: Matt, you’ve covered immigration for years. How abnormal is a sight like the one you’re looking at?
MATT RIVERS: Where we are right now, which I’m literally looking at the downtown skyline of the city of El Paso, what I’m seeing, is hundreds of migrants beneath the border wall here. That is unusual to see. We’ve seen large groups of migrants end up in other parts of the border over the last few years, with hundreds of people arriving at once. For example, people will remember, in 2021, there were thousands of Haitian migrants that ended up in a place called Ciudad Acuna, which is right across the border from Del Rio, Texas. But to have this many migrants here on the border in downtown El Paso essentially is relatively unprecedented.
I have come to this part of the border for years now, this exact spot on the border [and], many people often cross here because the Rio Grande is quite low here, and I’ve never seen anything like this. When we arrived on Sunday evening, we saw hundreds of people who had just crossed all at once.
This was a group of people that had gotten together over the last several weeks. We don’t know exactly how all of these people managed to come together, but what we do know is that they arrived here in Ciudad Juarez on Sunday using buses. So mainly these groups of hundreds of people arrived in Ciudad Juarez all at the same time, and they collectively made a decision, as is often what happens in a lot of these caravans…to cross all at once. And so basically, for the first time that I’ve seen at this particular border crossing…hundreds of people decided to cross the river at once. And what that did was effectively overwhelm, very quickly, the relatively limited migrant facilities that Customs and Border Protection officials have.
They can only process a certain amount of people at a time, and so you saw hundreds of people in line. They’ve been there for more than a day now. Border Patrol agents are prioritizing women and children. They get processed first, [and] single males then thereafter. [They’re] either going to be selectively released pending other immigration proceedings in the United States, or they will be taken to other Border Patrol facilities along other parts of the border. Because, simply put, the El Paso sector right now, where we are, is just overwhelmed by the number of migrants that are arriving there.
START HERE: Is it this key deadline coming up in the immigration policy debate? Title 42 is this policy that was implemented during the pandemic that basically made it easier for us to boot migrants out of the country when they arrive. That’s supposed to be going away soon. I’m wondering, is that changing what types of crowds are going to be crossing the border?
RIVERS: It very well might. I mean, every single person. And when I say every single person, I mean every single person has the same opinion that I’ve spoken to here on the Ciudad Juarez side of the border in Mexico. They say that the amount of people that are going to be showing up because of this policy ending is going to grow perhaps substantially.
This was a policy that was put in place during the Trump administration. It is actually a health policy order. It’s a directive that allows the United States for public health reasons to immediately expel people from the United States, migrants from the U.S., who otherwise would be granted asylum cases or at least asylum hearings. And that has been in place now going back to 2020. There’s a possibility, depending on a couple of court cases that are pending, that the Title 42 policy will be ending as soon as next week. And this is something that migrants know about. So the migrants that we’ve seen cross already in just the last 36 hours, they’re not waiting for that policy to end.
I have personally spoken to a half dozen migrants on this side of the border, and they’re representative of many other people who say they are waiting for Title 42 to end potentially next week.
START HERE: Oh, like Dec. 22nd, I’m going to cross?
RIVERS: Exactly. Dec. 22nd. That’s my day, or maybe even on the 21st, whenever that ruling comes down, they’re leaving the shelter; they’re going across and they’re going to apply for asylum in the United States. So the crowds that we’re seeing today could be even greater next week. It’s the border. We can’t say anything for sure, but that is certainly a possibility and something that people on both sides of the border are planning for.
An undated photo of the Atrevida II, the U.S. Coast Guard is searching for the sailboat and its crew Kevin Hyde and Joe DiTommasso. – U.S. Coast Guard
(NEW YORK) — The United States Coast Guard is looking for two missing sailors who were last seen on Dec. 3 in North Carolina.
Kevin Hyde, 64, and Joe DiTommasso, 76, departed Cape May, New Jersey, late last month on their 30-foot sailboat, the “Atrevida II,” according to the Coast Guard. The pair was last seen aboard their boat as it left the Oregon Inlet in North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
According to the Coast Guard, family and friends contacted officials on Sunday after last speaking with the pair on that same day.
“We’re continuing to search for the ‘Atrevida II,’ a U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson told ABC News. “We have several assets, both aircraft and vessel, searching.”
The U.S. Coast Guard has attempted urgent broadcasts. It said it let the boating public know via radio transmission that it’s looking for the two men and have reached out to both commercial and recreational boats to be on the lookout, a spokesperson said.
According to officials, the pair left port at Cape May on Nov. 27 and were traveling to Marathon, Florida.
The Coast Guard described the boat as having a bluish-purple hull, while structure and sails.
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Energy on Tuesday announced a scientific breakthrough in nuclear fusion at a national lab in California, marking a major step toward developing a new, sustainable form of energy that releases virtually no carbon dioxide or other types of air pollution.
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California successfully generated a fusion reaction between two hydrogen atoms and maintained that reaction in a controlled setting, marking the potential to use such reactions to generate huge amounts of energy without burning fuels.
The announcement could mark a major step in creating a form of energy that would not release the gases that are warming the planet and contributing to climate change, but is still decades away from being ready for large-scale application.
“This is a great day,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at a Washington news conference, adding that the achievement “will go down in the history books.”
“Today, we tell the world that America has achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough. When that happened it was because we invested in our national labs and we invested in fundamental research, and tomorrow will continue for a future that is powered, in part by fusion energy,” she said.
“This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society,” Granholm said. “If we can advance fusion energy, we could use it to produce electricity, transportation, fuels, power, heavy industry so much more. It would be like adding a power drill to our toolbox and building a clean energy economy.”
The reaction itself was done on Dec. 5 at the National Ignition Facility, the world’s largest laser system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The lab’s director, Kim Budil, joked that the lab’s acronym, LLNL, stands for “lasers, lasers, nothing but lasers.”
The experiment pointed 192 lasers at a container holding a small pellet of fuel the size of a peppercorn, specifically made up of deuterium and tritium – both isotopes of hydrogen.
Those lasers generated 2.05 megajoules of energy within that container that hit the fuel pellet and ignited the reaction, briefly heating it to over 3 million degrees Celsius — creating the conditions of a star — and generating 3.15 megajoules of energy.
That increase is why the experiment is being called such a success because by generating more energy than they put in it proves the potential that this kind of reaction could be a source of power someday, if they can scale it up and make it much more efficient outside of a lab setting.
The lasers themselves required 300 megajoules to power, which Budil said is in part because the lasers are based on older technology. But they believe it can be made more efficient to potentially create much more power than was represented by the lab experiment with decades more research and significant private sector investment.
“This demonstrates it can be done. That threshold being crossed allows them to start working on better lasers, more efficient lasers, on better containment capsules, etc. The things that net are necessary to allow it to be modularized and taken to commercial scale,” Granholm said.
Granholm and other officials emphasized that the announcement is also a benefit to US national security. The reaction created by the scientists at the California lab is a controlled version of the same reaction that takes place in nuclear weapons without the mass destruction, so this could allow the government to research deterrents for nuclear weapons without the need for real world weapons testing.
The idea is frequently represented in science fiction coming to life, said Paul Dabbar, a distinguished visiting fellow at Columbia University and former Department of Energy undersecretary for science, who oversaw the national labs in his role at the department. He said fusion power has been featured in films like “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” which filmed at the lab announcing the new development, and “Iron Man” who uses a form of fusion power in the Arc Reactor that keeps him alive.
“What was just accomplished was a goal of science that can hopefully lead to having the ultimate power source, nature’s power source, on Earth, which is a contained fusion reaction,” Dabbar told ABC News.
Dabbar said nuclear fusion is essentially harnessing the power of the sun, or at least the same power that creates stars. He said the basic physics of the reaction has been understood for decades but scientists haven’t been able to keep the reaction going because it requires a tremendous amount of heat and pressure to maintain.
“If we could bring a star down to earth, right. You’ve got a bunch of stars, basically controlled stars in buildings around the Earth. And we’re taking the most abundant element in the universe and converted into energy, just like the sun but in boxes here. And no environmental impact and we have literally unlimited energy based on the amount of hydrogen there is,” he said.
Dabbar said that while generating and controlling this reaction was the hardest step, there’s still a lot of work to do to figure out how to contain and maintain it outside a lab setting, including designing a power plant that can handle that amount of heat and energy created by the reaction and still last at least 10 or 20 years.
But he said the advantages are huge. A fusion power plant could produce a lot of power from one facility and would emit no carbon, no air pollution, and generate very little waste compared to the nuclear power plants in use today. It’s also fueled by hydrogen, which is incredibly abundant.
“It literally has all the advantages of many of the alternatives it with none of the disadvantages of all the alternatives. And so it could be you know, if a power plant can be made it would be incredibly positive,” Dabbar said.
