So have you heard? We just got closer to Clean Energy

ZILLO Young Reporter and current Youth Parliament Representative Leo gives an in depth look at a potential life changing leap forward in science and engineering taking us bolding in the future and clean energy

JET (Joint European Torus) Laboratories had a major break through recently in their quest towards Nuclear Fusion as they smashed two atoms together and made some energy, they produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds by doing this.

How does this work? Hah I’m glad you asked, so you might of heard of nuclear energy, well there’s actually two types of this : Fission and Fusion.

Nuclear energy is a good source of energy as it matches the same amount of energy produced by fossil fuels but doesn’t created any Carbon Dioxide or greenhouse gas, so it could well be a solution for the transition away from fossil fuels and stop further climate disasters created by the continued use of fossil fuels.

Fission is what you normally think about when you hear about nuclear energy y’know like the Homer Simpson, big boom scary Chernobyl stuff. Fission is essentially when you hit a big atom with an neutron (A Particle with a neutral charge) and it splits into smaller bits, and that creates energy but the smaller atoms made during process can be radioactive, so yeah its not perfect.

Okay but fusion is the cool stuff, it’s on the secret menu, nuclear fusion once described as “The power of the sun in the palm of my hand” by Doctor Octopus in Sam Raimi’s Classic Spiderman 2, and that is actually the basically the whole idea behind fusion, let’s make energy the same way the sun does!

The sun makes energy by smashing tiny atoms together and making a slightly less tiny atom, like when you get two bits of Lego to make a big clump of Lego but if that process gives out massive amounts of heat, actually it’s a bad analogy. Anyway fusion is the reason why the sun is so hot.

The funny thing is even though nuclear fusion is literally how the sun works its surprisingly safe. The first radio activity element is Technetium, the 43rd element, not even our sun could make an atom that big so it will be nearly impossible for us to make Technetium via fusion. This make fusion objectively better than fission as it doesn’t have any of that Godzilla inducing radioactive by-products, however it does produce Helium?

Okay back to the JET Lab what they did was they slammed two Hydrogen atoms together and this made Helium and this reaction created some energy, although this isn’t a lot of energy, the amount of energy would only boil about 60 kettles, its very exciting news as the last experiment like this that happened was back when Titanic was a new movie in 1997 and the amount of energy produced was less than half of what was recently made, showing new designs made for the reactor are good and could mean more experiments like this could happen in the future developing the possibility of use of nuclear fusion as a source of energy.

So maybe this experiment could result in a greener future which we all crave, it looks like we are creeping closer to the world of tomorrow.