44 2GM Saturday June 11 2022 | the times
Wo r l d
Unlimited energy from seawater with
no carbon emissions and virtually no
radioactive waste — if the promise of
nuclear fusion sounds too good to be
true, that’s because it has been.
Untold resources and 70 years of
work by some of the brightest minds
have been spent smashing atoms
together at temperatures hotter than
the core of the sun, to little avail.
A start-up from Munich, however,
is turning the heads of Europe’s
industrial giants as it uses lasers to
seek the holy grail of energy research.
Conventional atomic power sta-
tions work by harvesting the energy
from unstable forms of elements such
as uranium or plutonium, whose at-
oms break apart in a process known
as fission. This is effective but leaves
nuclear waste that remains radio-
active for tens of thousands of years.
Nuclear fusion follows the opposite
principle, melding together lighter
atoms such as hydrogen to release
energy. It is, essentially, the same
thing that happens in thermonuclear
explosions and inside stars.
The biggest difficulties are the
enormous amount of energy needed
to fuse the atoms and then how to
safely control a blob of super-heated
plasma that is in effect a small sun.
Moritz von der Linden, chief exec-
utive of Marvel Fusion, said: “I always
like to compare it to a pot of tomato
sauce. If you put a pot of tomato sauce
on your stove and you put it on at full
throttle, the sauce starts heating up
and starts moving... The problem is if
you leave it on full throttle it’s going
to end up on your ceiling.”
Von der Linden’s company, found-
ed three years ago, takes a different
approach. It uses extremely brief
pulses of light from powerful lasers to
squeeze a dense pellet of hydrogen
and boron-11, a slightly heavier iso-
tope of boron. The pressure from the
laser fuses the hydrogen and boronMafia ‘trying
to get back
into politics’
Tom Kington RomeThe arrest of two Sicilian local election
candidates caught seeking votes from
suspected Cosa Nostra bosses has
raised fears that the mafia is seeking to
regain a toehold in politics.
Francesco Lombardo, a candidate for
the hard-right Brothers of Italy party,
and Pietro Polizzi, a candidate with
Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party,
were overheard on police wiretaps.
“Help me since you know I wish you
well, and you know I will do all I can,”
Polizzi told Agostino Sansone, 72. “If I
am powerful, you are powerful too.”
Sansone, who has convictions for
mafia crimes, is part of the family that
harboured Toto Riina, the notorious
Cosa Nostra godfather, in the early
1990s. Lombardo was overheard in
talks with Vincenzo Vella, who has been
convicted three times for mafia ties.
“It is not morally and politically
acceptable that people with mafia con-
victions are influencing the election,”
said Fiammetta Borsellino, whose
father was murdered by Cosa Nostra.N
o dress code,
no recitals
longer than 30
minutes and
classical
music offered free or for
a modest fee, all set in a
Renaissance palace
(Philip Willan writes).
Welcome to the
Mantua chamber music
festival, which has cast off
the fusty image its title
suggests to bring 340
musicians to the northern
Italian town for 150
concerts over five days.
The event, which has
celebrated its tenth
anniversary, is reaching
out to untapped
audiences with about 30
short concerts a day.
Carlo Fabiano, 66, who
is festival director and
doubles as first violin,said music made better
humans — but its
presentation must
change. “Young people
don’t want to sit still for a
concert lasting two
hours,” he said.
The informal
atmosphere last week in
Leon Battista Alberti
piazza, showed it can be
done. As the Danish
MidtVest Ensemble
played, diners chatted
outdoors while children
played in the square.
Concerts for as little as €5
when they were not free
attracted a more
egalitarian audience. As a
bonus, concertgoers can
speak to the performers
after the show to learn
about the piece they have
just heard.
Fabiano said chamber
music provided a
democratic model for
society, with no
conductor in charge.
The concerts take
chamber music back to
the intimate spaces for
which it was written,
elegant halls decorated by
eminent artists.Dress-down
classics are
kept short
and sweet
A typically
informal
performance
at the Mantua
festival in ItalyHoly grail of clean energy
a step closer, say scientists
Germany
Oliver Moody BerlinPellet of boron
and hydrogen
fuel is injected
into chamberEnergy is
converted to
electricity that
can be fed into
the power grid11High-intensity laser
is fired at the fuel in
a pulse lasting a
fraction of a
second22Laser fuses the fuel
into helium atoms,
releasing energy that
is harvested through
heat exchange or an
electrostatic field3443How it works
Source: Marvel Fusionis the theory. In practice, Marvel
Fusion has carried out computer sim-
ulations and laser tests at facilities in
Bavaria, Colorado and Texas. But it is
unlikely to have a working prototype
reactor until the end of the decade.
Its model has attracted support
from prominent scientists such as
Gérard Mourou, who won part of the
2018 Nobel prize in physics for his
work on short-pulse lasers. Com-
panies such as Siemens Energy and
Thales, the French conglomerate,
have invested heavily in Marvel.
The United States and China are
ploughing their resources into
nuclear fusion, which could lead the
transition to clean energy.
In February the Joint European
Torus reactor in Culham, south Ox-
fordshire, smashed the world record
for the amount of energy made in a
sustained nuclear fusion reaction.
Ursula von der Leyen, the Euro-
pean Commission president, has said
technology could solve the energy
crisis. She added: “While wind and
solar are welcome, they won’t be
sufficient to meet energy demand in
the long run.”together
into positively
charged helium particles that repel
each other and fly apart at about
30 per cent the speed of light in a
phenomenon known as a Coulomb
explosion.
The resulting energy can be cap-
tured through established technolo-
gies such as heat exchange or an elec-
trostatic field. The laser pulses last
about 30 quadrillionths of a second
— that’s 30 with 15 zeros — followed
by about five trillionths of a second of
tiny fireworks in the fuel chamber.
The reactions are so short that they
are self-contained, with no need for
the elaborate magnetic shielding that
has bedevilled previous efforts to
make fusion power worthwhile.
“Coming back to my tomato sauce
analogy, we don’t need to heat up the
tomato sauce but we flick every atom
in the sauce and give it extreme kin-
etic energy,” Von der Linden said.
“This method is extremely efficient,
it doesn’t create any long-lasting
nuclear waste and the energy har-
vesting is straightforward. There is
no need for complex shielding.” That