We all know about ‘splitting the atom’, it happened a hundred years ago. In Manchester, oddly. Lot of bad things happen up there. But Ernest Rutherford ‘split an atom’ and released a shitload of energy. Later they ‘invented’ nuclear fission, yer bog-standard, chain-reaction type atom-splitting thing. It wasn’t until Robert Oppenheimer came along and turned that into a bomb in 1945 that anyone took notice. Then rather a lot of people took notice. Many of them noticing it just long enough to say “FUUU-!!!”

Nuclear power stations work on fission. Take a very dangerous product of a radioactive nature, like Uranium, like Plutonium, and effect a fission process but in a controlled manner. No-one wants to see a mushroom cloud over Esher. Loads of energy, because once started the process goes on and on and on as the energy released by the atoms ‘splitting’ causes the next ones to split, with loads of energy left spare to heat my kettle and allow 300 million people to watch the World Cup.

But its a nasty process. It goes wrong. Chernobyl. And nastier still possibly is that it produces ‘nuclear waste’. Plutonium and Uranium that is ‘depleted’ but only as far as its energy yielding days are concerned. It has to be ‘dumped’. But where do you dump it? It may be depleted but its still highly radioactive and will be for a few thousand years. You can’t just fly-tip it into Waitrose car park. They have cctv.

So the ‘nuclear power’ dream has always been ‘fusion’. Fission is splitting, fusion is combining. Which lets off even more energy, works with lovely, clean hydrogen rather than rotten, dirty radioactive isotopes and is very controllable. Its how the sun works; how hard can it be? In fact it is very hard and requires way more energy to create than is generated in the process. You’d need to imput 3 boiled kettle loads to boil one kettle. And then yesterday, those damn Yanks, for the first time EVERRRRR, created nuclear fusion which produced 50% more energy than it ‘cost’ to fuse. And that is truly fabulous. Cheap energy here we are!!! Unfortunately, it ain’t cheap, its very very expensive. And needs a day to set up each fusion.

So the race is on; get it cheaper and it needs to be happening once every second, rather than once a day and we’re in biz. So all you have to do is work out how to get there first.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx