LETTER OF THE MONTH

Always 30 years…

I have keenly followed nuclear fusion research for over 30 years and, as the old joke goes, it’s always been just 30 years away, so I’d have hoped to have working fusion reactors by now! Therefore, I was thoroughly pleased when I heard about the breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US (January, p14), where ‘ignition’ has been achieved for the first time. The holy grail has been to get a net gain of energy and when it came, I expected it to be very small. But it was huge, with 2.05 megajoules hitting the target hydrogen isotopes and 3.15 megajoules being released. Some critics will say that, in reality, with 300 megajoules of power going to the laser, the actual gain is only 0.15 megajoules, but even this is an amazing result. And now it’s been proven to work, we can hopefully increase the efficiency of the process and scale it up. I look forward to seeing commercial fusion power, hopefully in less than 30 years!

Luke Russell, Tingley

WRITE IN AND WIN!

The writer of next issue’s Letter Of The Month winsThe Secrets Of Life quartet from Otium Press, including How Did Life End Up With Us? How Did We Get To Be So Different? Why Do We All Behave In The Way We Do? and So What Does It All Mean? Once you start reading these, you’ll be able to find out the answers to all those important questions! otiumpress.com