![]() ![]() ![]() Five big storiesĪsylum | Rishi Sunak ha s insisted he can clear a backlog of nearly 100,000 asylum claims by the end of next year as part of a five-point plan that includes changes to the law that will criminalise and then remove tens of thousands of people who claimed asylum after travelling to the UK by small boats. Today’s Grinch-like (but also very interesting!) newsletter, with Dr Michael Bluck, director of the Centre for Nuclear Engineering at Imperial College London, is about the long distance from a remarkable breakthrough to an energy utopia – and why fusion won’t help us get to net zero. Climate crisis solved, and we can all get back to obsessing over Harry and Meghan on Netflix instead.ĭisappointingly, though, it isn’t anything like that simple. In theory, nuclear fusion reactors could one day be a plentiful source of power without any associated carbon emissions or radioactive waste. Granholm called it “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century”. ![]() Which sounds miles better than a time machine, to be honest. (If so, please stop reading, this is not a newsletter for nerds.) Yesterday, after the news was initially reported by the Financial Times, Joe Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, confirmed a scientific breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that’s a very long way from a superhero exoskeleton or a souped-up DeLorean: for the first time, a fusion reaction has produced more energy than it takes in. You may know nuclear fusion as the power source for Iron Man’s suit, or the basis of the Mr Fusion Home Energy Reactor that powers the, er, flux capacitor in Back to the Future. ![]()
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