At first glance, it was another stunning triumph for President Donald J. Trump. The Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on July 15 included more than $90 billion in "energy and AI investments," and high praise for companies that would build their own electricity plants to accommodate the doubling of electricity that it is estimated will be needed for Artificial Intelligence ventures to ensure that China will not end up overtaking the US in the fields of AI, energy and quantum computing.
Oddly, the most significant innovation -- nuclear-fusion energy -- which is certain to drive the future of clean limitless, inexpensive energy for the future of AI technology to ensure America's dominance -- was not even mentioned.
Trump repeatedly praised the immediate expansion of fossil fuel energy, "nuclear energy," and even coal -- but the nuclear energy Trump was referring to was, disappointingly, only nuclear fission reactors, now pointedly called "safe," while the Chinese Communist Party, with a relatively small investment of only about $1.5 billion a year, has been racing ahead to develop far safer and vastly superior nuclear-fusion reactors, which produce clean cheap energy that is effectively unlimited. The Chinese, in fact, have already exported a tokamak fusion device to Thailand.
Nothing will guarantee the US falling behind China in the next decades more than putting all America's eggs in the currently more comfortable and familiar, and easily available, nuclear fission reactors.
It is crucial for at least some of this "more than $90 billion" to be used for a crash program – a Nuclear Fusion Manhattan Project -- if Trump does not want China to end up "eating" America's AI, energy and quantum computing lunch.
A Trump MAGA program to develop nuclear fusion energy immediately -- to catch up to China and overtake it -- cannot be started soon enough, perhaps with a tech genius more familiar with this new frontier of science, and to be named Secretary of Nuclear Fusion Development.
This initiative is truly as urgent and important in the new frontier of energy as Trump's brilliant Space Force was in the new frontier of America's military.
Let us hope, to maintain a US lead over China, that Trump will initiate a Trump MAGA Manhattan Project for the Development of Nuclear Fusion Energy at once.
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
