I hope you've not gotten carried away with the nuclear fusion hype last month from California that was credulously lapped up by the MSM. \u00a0Here's a sobering quote in case you did:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf these developments prove ultimately successful, we should have quite an inexhaustible supply of fuel to provide for man\u2019s needs in the future<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n This is Sir John Cockroft, director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire, speaking \u2013 in 1958.<\/p>\n These \"developments\" were the\u00a0Zeta (Zero Energy Thermonuclear Assembly) programme, which came to nothing. \u00a0I'd vaguely heard of Zeta, but not of the\u00a0Perhapsatron and the Stellarator, two early American projects (mentioned in The Times). \u00a0Someone had a sense of humour at any rate.<\/span><\/p>\n The clever money (and happily there is a lot of private money being focused on fusion) seems to be on magnetic confinement rather than the high velocity rifle technology the Americans are using. \u00a0Expect good news in around 5 years time, I read, with a commercial reactor still some 20 years away. \u00a0But it's been 20 years away for about 60 years. \u00a0It seems obvious that I shall not see fusion power, but will my grandchildren? \u00a0And will it be available soon enough to save us from Climageddon?<\/p>\n Answers on a postcard ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I hope you've not gotten carried away with the nuclear fusion hype last month from California that was credulously lapped up by the MSM. \u00a0Here's a sobering quote in case you did: \u201cIf these developments prove ultimately successful, we should...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}