What is the fastest-moving object on Earth? Certainly not the traffic on the A34 north of Oxford, but the answer lies not far away. In a small chamber in an anonymous building on an industrial estate outside the city there is a machine that regularly fires small aluminium pellets, about the size of a postage stamp, at speeds of 20km per second (45,000mph). It is the headquarters and laboratory of First Light Fusion, one of a number of companies and organisations that are trying to harness commercial power from nuclear fusion – potentially a far cleaner and safer form of generating nuclear power than our existing nuclear fission power stations.
There is little of the feel of a nuclear power station as Nick Hawker, CEO and co-founder of First Light Fusion, shows me around the…
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