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In focus with Sir Bernard Ingham
Up to our ears in debt but value for money still has no appeal
Well, now we know how much Chancellor George Osborne is committed to value for money in energy policy. Not much. True, in his autumn statement he halved subsidies for solar panels but only because their cost has come down substantially. He also brought in £250m energy cost relief for intensive energy users who are supposed to be a prime target for reducing carbon emissions, thereby complicating energy policy still further while usefully helping to retain heavy industry in the UK.
I agree with Sebastien Balibar's condemnation of the international nuclear fusion programme (Opinion, 15 May); it is a colossal dead end for more reasons than he gave, one of which was somewhat understated - the temperature required for a deuterium-tritium reaction is about 300 million degrees, not 100. This is nearly 20 times hotter than the temperature at the centre of the Sun. A device containing plasma at such a temperature has a high potential for catastrophic failure.
The future of generating electricity from nuclear energy lies in good old fission reactors, especially in fast reactors, which can breed their own fuel.
