I’ve just finished reading Charles Seife’s “Sun in a Bottle” – an account of the first fifty years of nuclear fusion research. It is a fascinating story, not least for the optimism that has driven research into fusion reactors. At the start of that development, we were repeatedly told that fusion power might appear at five years notice, giving us energy that was “too cheap to meter”. That last claim was made in 1954. It was a great vision, which may yet come true, although I doubt that the “too cheap to meter” will ever happen, as there’s a lot of infrastructure needed to deliver electricity. However, the prospect of fusion as our major source of electricity is still largely a dream.
What struck me about much of the language used to promote the fusion dream over the last seventy years is that it is almost identical to the promises being used to sell the latest miracle technology – Carbon Capture and Storage. Carbon Capture and Storage is being promoted as the means of saving the world from climate change with a similar evangelical zeal to the way that fusion was in the 1950s. You could take any article or press release about either, swap the phrase “Nuclear Fusion” for “Carbon Capture”, or vice versa, and it would feel just as convincing. Sadly, Carbon Capture’s imminent arrival is just as tenuous as that of nuclear fusion. Its credibility is being held together by a mesh of minor achievements, suggesting that small academic advances will somehow scale into vast plants which will save us from climate change. The same optimistic requests of “just a few more year’s work” and “just a few more hundred billions of investment” are blinding our technically-illiterate politicians into believing that the promise is real, without noticing that they are being fed the same story. In the UK, Ed Miliband sees it as the saviour of his net zero plans. The bad news is that he thinks he can make it happen by adding the billions of pounds of development costs to future domestic energy bills.
