Humans have always dreamed of harnessing the power of the Sun. Whilst we capture more solar energy, it’s not enough to supply our power-hungry world. What if we could replicate the way the Sun produces its energy?

The Sun’s core is hot: 15 million degrees centigrade to be precise. Whizzing around it at great speeds are hydrogen atoms. They collide, fuse together and provide a burst of energy in the form of light. This never-ending process uses around 600 million tons of hydrogen every second. Without this process, life could not exist on this planet.

But the Sun’s core is not the hottest place in the solar system. Surprisingly, that honour goes to an innocuous-looking research establishment near Oxford in the United Kingdom. Culham Science Centre is where the JET (Joint European Torus) nuclear fusion reactor is based. There, a gram of hydrogen is heated to 200 million degrees centigrade by high-energy beams. See what happens below.

Conventional nuclear reactors use nuclear fission, the opposite of fusion. Energy is released when the heavy atoms in uranium decay to form smaller atoms. A fusion reactor works in the opposite way by catching the sub-atomic particle formed by the fused hydrogen atoms in lithium liquid causing it to boil. The boiling lithium liquid is then used to drive electricity-producing steam turbines.

No carbon dioxide emissions and a plentiful supply of raw material (ie. water from which the hydrogen is produced) mean that the fusion is better for the environment than fission. Added to that , the process is more stable and the reactor tiles only become mildly radioactive and are safe within one hundred years. So there isn’t any radioactive material to worry people.

But there’s a downside. The fusion process can’t be made to last long at present and produce more energy than is put in to speed up the hydrogen atoms. JET is only able to return 65% of the power put into it and the reaction only lasts a few seconds. And JET is the largest and most advanced fusion reactor on the planet.

JET, though, is being used to develop a new reactor, ITER. It’s hoped ITER will be operational by 2018. This will generate electricity from fuel in ordinary seawater. Amazingly, just one cubic kilometre of seawater contains enough material to release more energy than all the oil reserves!

ITER is a massive project. It’s the largest joint science project since the International Space Station. So important is it, that the UK has promised almost half of its energy-research budget to the ten billion euro programme.

Unfortunately, it’s likely to take another three decades before fission power stations are a reality. But as John Parris, of the HiPER project which is looking into laser-drivin fusion, told the Mail On Sunday: ‘This is save-the-world science. Fusio is the only serious answer to future energy demands – this is the energy Holy Grail. The human race has a massive, ravenous demand for power, and there is no other way to provide grid-level energy’.

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