Breakthrough In the early afternoon of August 4, 2050 a remarkable scientific breakthrough took place in a laboratory in the small town of Livermore, California. The Lawrence Livermore National Lab had been working on nuclear fusion since 2008, using lasers to try to get atoms of tritium and deuterium to fuse and release energy. A "break even point" had been reached in December 2022, when the amount of energy released from the reaction had equalled the amount input to the lasers to achieve the result. Since that time progress had been slow and incremental. As an clean energy source without radioactive waste, the National Ignition Facility had been unable to compete in cost with natural green power plants like solar energy and wind turbines. But everything changed on that eventful day in August 2050, when a routine increase in laser power switched on an unexpected resonance in the nuclear reaction, and more `fuel' `burned' in a fraction of a second than had previously been consumed in minutes. LLNL, as it is referred to, is a large government laboratory, one of a handful run by the Department of Energy and supporting universities. But a buzz went around the whole lab in no longer than it takes for light to arrive from the sun. Was this experiment repeatable? In a short time it was shown to be so. The lead scientists gathered round a laptop to find the words and pictures to get this into the scientific literature as fast as they reasonably could. A week later it was time for a press conference to let the world know of the discovery. The Director of Lawrence Livermore and the Secretary of the Department of Energy, Althea Wilkins, were the lead speakers and representatives of the laser fusion team shed their lab coats for suits to speak at the occasion. TV networks and reporters from San Francisco filled the conference room to cover the story. By chance Elaine Waters had turned on the TV to take her mind off troubles she was having finding the right colouring for a portrait she was working on. An artist, aged 63, and living in Baltimore, she had been concentrating on portraiture since her husband had retired from academia a few years ago. "Abundant clean energy," the DoE Secretary exclaimed. That got her attention. She turned up the volume so that she could relay the news to her husband, a social scientist, when he returned from golf later that afternoon. A news notification on his iPhone prompted Fred Jarret to look further at this story. A lecturer in history at the University of Cape Town, aged 45, he had always had an interest in science, rarely missing the regular science show on SABC. Fred recognised that work on terrestrial nuclear fusion had had a long development history. Success had always been 30 years away. He wondered how large the infrastructure had become to make the nuclei fuse. It was hard to tell from the article in the Cape Times that his iPhone directed him to. But it was a good question, could this be replicated in every country in the world, in Southern Africa? If so, the implications for society would be massive. All those living in informal settlements throughout South Africa might have access to cheap power.
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