Does nuclear energy have a future?

The very short answer is yes, I do think nuclear energy has got a more promising looking future than it’s had for some time. The slightly more detailed answer is that it’s very interesting, because a lot of people in the green lobby of course have traditionally had kind of you know good old green recyclable and environmentally friendly on one side, and the polar opposite has been nuclear energy, dark and nasty and polluting and toxic and around for hundreds of years.

But strangely as time has gone on you are beginning to find that some people in the green lobby are having to look again at nuclear energy. There are lots of problems with it if it’s not dealt with well, but if you can find ways to actually use it in a cleaner way and particularly with work on fusion. There are projects in Britain like something called the Joint European Taurus. Now Taurus is not in this context a sign of the zodiac, but a Taurus is a magnetic field. It’s a magnetic field that you use to hold high energy plasma together, and they are reaching a point with this where they can just about get more energy out than they put in.

Now I don’t know whether you are familiar with the processes involved in nuclear fission as opposed to nuclear fusion. Now nuclear fusion is what powers the sun, but it takes enormously powerful temperatures for that to work. But if you can reach those temperatures and do it in a controlled way, you can get incredible amounts of energy out the other side. And we are just about nearing the point where this is beginning to become possible.