Well it happened. Arsenal lost. Doesn’t really matter to whom they lost, but lose they did. A whopping 3 nil. Ok, for the sake of ‘old Malkie’, it was his beloved Crystal Palace who saw off the pretentious side of North London football, and with some degree of aplomb. And that result leaves Spurs in 4th place for the rest of the week. We can dream.

Meanwhile, they’re fighting royal battles to create more nuclear fusion so we can tell those Russians precisely where they can shove their fucking gas pipelines in a way that will go way beyond mere eye-watering. Because fusion is the dream.

Current nuclear power is generated by fission. Which is the breaking apart of atomic particles. Like they do in nuclear bombs. And the same problem is ever-present. That your reactor may turn into a nuclear bomb. Like it did in Chernobyl. Starting nuclear fission is easy. Controlling it and stopping it is anything but. And then, at the end of it, you get tons and tons of ‘nuclear waste’. Depleted of most of its useful potency, but still horribly radio-active, here’s 200 tons of Uranium, mate, won’t be safe for 34,200 years, where shall we dump it? Malaysia any good? Indonesia? In the ocean?? Very deep landfill in Worcester?

Fusion is different. Fusion is the joining together of atoms in such a way that energy is released. It’s clean. It’s very controllable. And has no waste end product. The problem is that this type of reaction, as makes the Sun ‘work’, merging two Hydrogen atoms to form one Helium one, can only be created in conditions like the Sun. So think ‘hot’. Very hot. Pressure. Lots of it. Creating the irony of how much energy it currently takes to make atoms thousands of degrees hotter than they would like to be and under intense pressure. It would cost (at current gas prices) £43,749.22 to make sufficient fusion energy to boil one kettle. Yet its a start. And if it can be upscaled so I can drink my normal 37 cups of tea a day without taking out a mortgage. Especially as one company (in ENGLAND, yaaaay) is producing fusion by a new method. Instead of trying to create ‘conditions like on the Sun’, they’re firing pellets at fuel particles in a special way. And it seems to be working. Another £42million in research funding and I can put the kettle on again.

No-one likes cold tea.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx