Our ship docked in Halong Bay, and I've had a lot of recent coverage because of our  Diamond Princess cruise through this area , so I will today focus on Fusion, the greatest hope for sustainable energy into the long-term future,  Today, only a history. There are two kinds of nuclear reactions. Fission:  splitting a heavy nuclei, like Uranium.  An Atomic Bomb gets energy from fission. Fusion:  joining light nuclei, like, like isotopes of Hydrogen, Deuterium and Tritium.  A Hydrogen Bomb uses fusion. Some  fusion history . In 1920, British physicist Francis Aston discovered that the mass of four hydrogen atoms is greater than the mass of one helium atom, which implied that energy can be released by combing hydrogen atoms to form helium. This concept provided the first hints of how stars produced energy. Henry Russell observed that a star's heat came from a hot core rather than the entire star. Mark Oliphant, working with Ernest Rutherford and oth...

Nearly a dozen years ago I wrote an article for  The Huffington Pos t on  Star Power for Humanit y.  The latest June issue of  Scientific American  featured  Star Power: What is the future of fusion energy?   You can click on that link for the full article.  I'll summarize: This past December, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNR ) claimed a breakthrough in attaining net positive with their laser fusion system.  No one had ever done that before. As an aside, I worked there in the 1970's on that project, and left because I could not envision the laser that would accomplish this task.  Can you believe that was around half a century ago? The bad news is that net positive is a long way from commercialization.  And certainly, that intriguing ultimate laser has not yet been invented. Well anyway, this article was written by Philip Ball, a British science writer who is my same age.  He has a PhD in physics from Bristol Un...