Official News page 2

THE DANGERS OF FUSION POWER

by Hally Godarkly

Last week, our esteemed editrix talked about the reasons behind the frequent demolition of weather control stations, thanks to the terrorist organization The Weathermen. But there's another piece of infrastructure that regular suffers unexpected demolition: fusion power generators - and these explosions have nothing to do with terrorists but are random accidents.

At least, they seem to be, but there must be some reason why the generators are prone to blowing up so often. The official explanation is that "fusion generators can suffer from instability in certain, rare circumstances," which is no explanation at all since it doesn't give any information about what those rare circumstances actually are. Hazed wanted to know more, so she sent me, her most reliable newsdroid, to investigate.

Now, I know zip about science, so the workings of fusion power plants are a complete mystery to me. I did a bit of research but frankly ended up even more confused. Phrases like "toroidal magnetic field for confining a plasma" and "azimuthal (rotational) symmetry" just made my brain hurt. Hey, I'm a journalist, not a science geek.

I realized I needed to talk to the experts, so I went right to the top, to Professor Meemaw Junebug of the University of Theoretical, Suppositional and Hypothetical Physics, the foremost brain in the field, and current president of the Galactic Society which is an organization for promoting science to the public. I bluffed my way into his office by pretending to be writing a puff piece about his great genius - it works every time - and then brought the conversation around to fusion generators and their habit of going boom.

I shouldn't have bothered. He launched into a lecture dense with technical terms, which made my head hurt even worse. Scientists! They don't talk the same language as the rest of us. I tried in vain to get him to dumb things down for little old me, but it was hopeless. Not one word he uttered was comprehensible. So much for communicating with the public!

But my visit wasn't in vain, because on my way out, I bumped into a group of post-graduate students who offered to take me for a drink at their favorite watering hole. I had a lovely time with these proto-scientists, and I even got the boffins-in-waiting to talk about fusion power in words that the average stupid journo - ie me - could understand.

My notes are a little hard to decipher, being smudged with rings from the beer glasses, but combined with what I remember through the alcoholic haze, I can cobble together the explanation Hazed was looking for.

As a charming chap with a piercingly-intelligent stare told me, although fusion generator technology has been around for centuries, it has always been problematic. It's inherently dangerous and unstable, and can only be kept from exploding by constant vigilance on the part of highly trained staff. Highly trained staff cost money, and constant vigilance means short shifts otherwise attention starts to wander, and that means more workers are needed for complete coverage, which means more money has to be spent.

Sure, he explained, the energy from the fusion plant is dirt cheap anyway so it shouldn't be a problem to absorb the extra staffing costs, but big business being what it is, it's inevitable that corners get cut somewhere. It's usually not long before some bean-counter questions why so many highly trained staff are sitting around doing nothing except watch the dials and gauges, so some of them get laid off or reassigned, or replaced with less-skilled workers, with the inevitable consequence: the plant goes unstable, nobody catches it in time, it blows up. In the long term it would of course be cheaper to keep the workers on the job rather than lose the plant entirely, but bean-counters have never been keen on long term thinking! Things would be different if he was in charge; he'd give the proper respect to scientists...

At this point he lapsed into a long, beer-fuelled megalomaniac rant about how he'd run the Galaxy, so I made my excuses and left.

The final piece of the puzzle was to do what Hazed did last week with the vandalized weather control stations, and use statistical analysis to figure out the probability of a fusion plant going critical. Sparing you the detailed workings which were provided to me by the statistics nerds, it seems that if you have any fusion plants on your planet, there's a half a percent chance that you'll get an explosion: the number you have doesn't increase the probability, so like weather control stations, if you are going to have one, you might as well have the full complement.

Of course, if you name your planet Chernobyl, you'll probably get more explosions, because the universe is like that!

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