7. Fusion Power Breakthrough
Fusion power, if we can nail it, could well solve a great deal of our energy problems. It produces a vast amount of energy and faw less radioactive waste than nuclear fission. To give you a good idea of its potency, nuclear fusion is how the sun produces its energy. The radioactive material from a fusion reactor will only remains dangerous for around 50 years, as opposed to the thousands of years from nuclear fission. The only problem is that fusion is really hard. There is light at the end of the tunnel, however, as a company in Los Angeles claim to have made a major breakthrough in the development of nuclear fusion. The thing is, to produce fusion power, you have to find a way of containing plasma at temperatures of at least 100 million degrees Celsius. This, as you might imagine, would melt any container you put it in, so you have to find a way of working with it without touching it. A privately funded company called Tri Alpha Energy claim to have taken another step towards this, containing superheated hydrogen plasma for a whole five milliseconds. Doesn't sound like much, but this just goes to show that it can be done, which brings us one step closer to clean, affordable energy that doesn't cost the earth in any sense of the word.