Quote:
Originally Posted by meld51
I went to the Culham Laboratory on Oxfordshire last night. This is the place where they do research into nuclear fusion reactors, which are able to create endless supplies of electricity from water. Apparently there is enough fusion energy in a litre of water to keep one person in electricity for 7 years. That is the same as burning 147 tons of coal.
Maybe this is our saving technology.
And it's almost pollution free. The only pollutants include a very small amount of low level radioactive waste. The other by-products are lithium and helium.
Here is a link if you are interested: http://www.fusion.org.uk/ |
There is a mind-bogglingly vast amount of energy locked up inside every atom in the universe. The trick is to be able to release it in a controlled and useful way. The best minds on Earth have been trying to get nuclear fusion to work for decades now and they are at the stage where the technology is capable of sustaining a fusion reaction for (IIRC) half an hour or more. But it is still a long way from being commercially viable. The reaction requires a pretty huge energy kick to get it started so until a reaction can be sustained more or less indefinitely, we're not going to be getting our cheap, limitless energy from fusion.
It is telling that, throughout the entire ongoing climate debate, nobody is talking about fusion in the energy mix. And this is despite the fact that the world's leading economies are spending billions on a co-operative project to develop the technology. They all think it is worth pursuing, but it's not going to reap benefits for a very long time yet.