Fuel bill price rise panic, solution found
More eco-tales from the Bellender Arms
A tourist had once wasted our local organic fair trade air to sing a folk song called ‘a Pub with no beer’, he didn’t make any friends amongst the locals. We were wondering if his song had jinxed us as the beer pumps in the Bellender Arms had run dry, for the first time since 1782. We were gathered on the terrace trying to find pleasure in the consumption of our local organic vegan spring water and wondering what had gone wrong with the beer supply. It seemed that the source of the problem was the brewery and not the Pub and we awaited news with impatience.
In the end it was Constable herself who explained everything. Constable was named after the painting that hung in the bedroom of her parents, wiser heads had suggested Wayne instead as in “Hey Wayne!” But Constable stuck and despite being named after a painter, or perhaps because of it, she had taken to science rather than art and was continually experimenting. People and small dogs had learnt to stay away when she plugged things in or lit the blue touch paper of her latest experiment. Returning to the beer problem, Constable explained that she had heard that the inhabitants of our neighbouring village were being hit with energy price rises and were in some distress. On hearing this Constable had decided to lend a hand and see what she could come up with as a solution. Fusion nuclear power was much in the news as some researchers somewhere had done something that meant that usable fusion power was still only 50 years away. Constable had decided to base her experiments on what she understood about fusion nuclear power. I should at this point mention that Constable is 12 years old, brilliant certainly, so we were keen to hear how she had gone about succeeding where so many before her had failed.
Her reading materials talked about the extreme temperatures and pressures needed to recreate the conditions to be found in stars. In order to surpass the Lawson criteria Constable decided to combine a tokamak design with inertial confinement by laser. The consensus on the Pub terrace was that this could possibly work but was a pretty ambitious thing to try in a garden shed.
Around the village a few things had disappeared and, it must be said, Constable had been the prime suspect. She now confirmed the veracity of this suspicion as she explained how she had built her tokamak ICF.
The container for the torus was Henriette’s favourite pressure cooker, Constable had calculated that it should be able to take the strain. She had added magnets around the cooker pot to create a containment field, she had discovered that audio speakers contain magnets which explained the lack of background music in the Pub over recent days. Adding lasers into the mix would seem complicated but Constable’s nimble fingers had stripped the lasers from 4 CD players, perhaps because of her young age she didn’t know what a CD was so repurposing the lasers seemed only logical.
All of this was fascinating stuff and we were riveted yet somehow unsatisfied as we couldn’t see how all this could possibly result in a beer drought. Constable had realised that her setup might not have enough pressure for the strong nuclear force to exceed the electrostatic force. A leap of genius on her part was to work out that if the fuel also produced pressure then there might be enough, so she decided to use brewers yeast instead of the more usual deuterium and tritium. A brave leap in the dark and practical too as, for some unknown reason, the local apothecary doesn’t stock heavy hydrogen isotopes.
As you may have guessed the experiment failed to pass the Coulomb barrier but, at the same time, it seems unlikely that the world has ever seen yeast being so vigorously kinetic. Henriette who is a pretty courageous gastronaut declared that the fusion yeast goo had a strong umami taste and would go well with our local organic horseradish flavoured crisps, serendipity is a wonderful thing
In the end it was George who summed things up, whilst he agreed that attempting to build a fusion nuclear reactor using a pressure cooker and some speaker magnets was a good initiative he proposed putting the Top fields to hemp the following year. We would harvest it and then help the neighbours insulate their houses. A bit less exciting but maybe more practical than recreating the Sun’s energy in a garden shed.