Why was my first introduction to nuclear energy in a movie theatre - and not in a classroom?

I was watching history unfold in front of my eyes. Every scientist whose name I had only ever seen written in a textbook - Rutherford, Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, Max Planck - was now present in front of me, in HD, of course.

No matter which stream you chose in high-school, I'm sure you must remember the model of an atom - the smallest thing in the universe giving the biggest headaches.

We all troubled our teachers with the same question: "Why can't you just teach us the final model of the atom and be done with it? What's the point of learning about something that is wrong?"

It was only when I sat three hours in a theatre to watch the Nolan-directed Oppenheimer did I realise, that the newest model of the atom (which I'm sure is still incorrect by the way and has some "limitations") would never have existed if it wasn't for the earlier ones and without studying the old models, we can never understand how important each minor discovery was.

“What I wanted to do was take the audience into the mind and the experience of a person who sat at the absolute center of the largest shift in history,” Nolan said in a Universal Pictures press release. “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived.”

But the thing is, we never went beyond the structure of the atom, and up until now, it wasn't even necessary to go deep into the topic in high-school. But times have changed, and the only two things changing faster are the climate and modern technology. You have new (and scarier) forms of intelligence coming up everyday, specifically built to take your jobs and to render your skillset useless. And the truth of the matter is, at present, we do not have the required skill set to survive in such a world.

The things which are being taught to us today are the same things which were taught to our parents back in their day - when they used to walk ten miles barefoot in the scorching heat and swim in crocodile infested waters just to reach school.

Of course, knowledge never gets antiquated - what we learn today form the fundamental concepts which will help us understand more complex ones. But at the same time, knowledge needs to be upgraded too to make sure that students are made aware that the world is drastically changing in the bubble beyond their NCERT textbooks - and that they are nowhere close to keeping up with it.

Artificial Intelligence isn't the future - it's our present. We use it every single day, ironically feeding the very data into it which will help it replace us in the job market. But this extensive use of AI poses another problem - one that the industry tries to hide from us.

Did you know that AI already uses as much energy as a small country? And this is only the beginning. Recently, Sam Altman commented on a post on X, saying, that using words like "please" and "thank you" in ChatGPT potentially costs the company tens of millions of dollars in processing power and electricity usage.

We are already living in a hopeless climate situation where the economies and the industries of the world are fighting for the minimal energy sources remaining. With the set up of billions of data centres around the world, that too at an alarming rate, there is no future where we would be able to supply that kind of energy sustainably...unless we change the source of energy.

A potential answer lies in fusion energy (not fission!), but don't be surprised if you haven't heard of it, after all, there is no education board in our country which even mentions it. Fusion is far-fetched, we aren't even taught about plasma beyond the fact that it is the fourth state of matter. This is the same plasma which makes up 99% of our universe and is utilized in everything today from semiconductor chips to nuclear fusion reactors.

It's funny to think that if you ask a 6th grader and a 12th grader "What is Plasma?", you will get the same answer.

Fusion energy holds all the benefits - it's clean, reliable, compact and safe - the only drawback is, it hasn't been harnessed yet. It's not economically viable because to produce 3.15MJ of fusion energy requires 322MJ of electricity. But, if harnessed, then it could potentially provide a solution to all our problems - from climate change to the AI revolution. And the investments say it all. Tech pioneers like Microsoft and Sam Altman are investing in private fusion companies such as Helion to buy electricity from them in the future.

Today energy powerhouses like China and USA are investing billions of dollars in fusion research and infrastructure. While most initioatives in China are government-backed, in US, it's the private sector that's making groundbreaking strides. Despite this heavy investment, the closest we have come to achieving net positive energy gain was in 2022 when 192 of the most powerful lasers in the world at National Ignition Facility in Lawrence, US, were concentrated on a fuel pellet of barely 5mm diameter and for a few nanoseconds, generated net positive energy.

There is no doubt about it, India is a major contributer in building a sustainable world for the future. Quite recently, it built the cryostat, a critical component to house the Tokamok fusion reactor being built at ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) with the world's biggest magnet. Furthermore, as of today, we have three start-ups investing more in fusion research and development and taking baby steps in the world of plasma physics. But then again, they are nothing compared to more than twenty-five fusion start-ups in the USA which have already achieved many wins in the field.

There is no hiding the fact that India lacks in investment in scientific research and developement but measures are being taken to improve that with the government collaboarting across borders and promoting more tech-based start-ups in the country, along with investing heavily in more renewable sources of energy. But at the same time, this investment should be made at the ground-level too.

The students need to be at least introduced to these modern-world concepts at the basic level, after all, how do you expect us to lead the future if we don't even know what the future is?

Thousands of students all over the country are in their last few years of schooling, completely unaware of what they want to do after school and of the world of possibilities avaiable to them in their very country. This lack of acquaintance with the opportunities around us is one of the biggest problems facing our education system today. Our education system is stuck in the same daily slog of getting a perfect score in boards but the truth of the matter is, this perfect score will only get you so many places, and the table of the leaders of the future is not one of them.