Honestly, the stuff people get up to. I was sent a link the other day to this piece featured on the BBC News site, about a guy named Mark Suppes, who has built a nuclear reactor in a warehouse in New York. That’s right . . . he’s built himself his own little nuclear reactor. And he’s not alone. Apparently, there’s a whole bunch of amateur nuclear scientists out there, messing about with atoms and stuff.
There’ll be some younger kids reading this, so I’ll keep the terms as simple as I can . . . which will be barely above the level that I understand them myself.
For a start, Suppes won’t be powering any nuclear submarines anytime soon. He’s experimenting with fusion, which is a different kind of reaction to fission. Fission is the type they use in power stations and submarines . . . and bombs. I have issues with the type of nuclear power we have around at the moment, for some very simple reasons. And it’s not just because of the (very slight) risk of a reactor blowing up and causing untold devastation:
1. Despite what people say, fission is not a low carbon energy source, because it relies on some pretty extensive mining operations to produce the fuel for the process. Those operations are hugely expensive (add that to the price of building a nuclear reactor) and they use lots of carbon-burning machinery.
2. We cannot get rid of the highly toxic, utterly destructive waste that the process produces. We are still incapable of building a storage device that can last longer than the waste stays radioactive. This stuff can poison land and sea, or even render them uninhabitable, for thousands of years.
In fission, you split an atom apart. That’s what releases the energy. You have to start with a very expensive, very radioactive material as fuel for this reaction. The radiation is one of the most dangerous parts of the process – it’s like poison that just spreads out through the air and soaks through your skin into your body. They have to use special shields to contain it. Once the fuel is used up, you are left with highly toxic radioactive waste that has to be got rid of – and that’s really, really difficult to do. Blasting it into space is probably the only sure way of not killing someone with it either now or in the future.
But fusion may offer a more reasonable future for nuclear power. In atomic terms, fusion is sort of the opposite to fission. 
You try and force two atoms to join together. This produces a new element, but also gives off a lot of power. The fuel for this is not radioactive; it’s basically taken from hydrogen gas, which is much, much cheaper (you can make it out of water) and very safe to use. I’m going to do a separate post some time about hydrogen-powered cars. The by-product of fusion (what’s left over after the reaction), is mainly helium, which is the gas used to inflate balloons for children’s parties.
Scientists are still trying to figure out how to generate power, in a practical way, using fusion. It’s really hard to get the conditions just right. But we know it’s possible, because it’s where the stars get their power. Our sun is an enormous fusion reactor. A lot of people think this is the power of the future.
The reactor that Mark Suppes has built isn’t going to create any stars. It cannot even generate any power. It can generate . . . a bubble. He is producing fusion on a tiny, tiny scale. But he claims that bubble is proof that fusion has taken place. It doesn’t sound like much, but then, he’s one guy working on his own in a warehouse. And there are apparently about forty of these guys around the world who have achieved fusion in their DIY reactors.
Other people with a lot more money – like the US Department of Energy National Laboratory – are working on this too. In France, an internationally funded organization called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is building what they hope will be the first fully operational fusion reactor, due to be completed in 2019.
And for anybody who thinks that some hobby scientist is a fool for spending thousands of dollars/euros on a machine that takes several minutes to make a bubble . . . I’d wait and see. I’ve heard the guys who set up Microsoft started off in a garage (or maybe a college lab). These kinds of breakthroughs can change the world – and it only takes one bright spark to crack the secret of fusion power.
