Mea Culpa: opposites confused – splitting and fusing, over and under

Questions of style and language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

(Getty Images)

In our report of the advance in nuclear fusion technology, in which the US National Ignition Facility succeeded in getting more energy out of a nuclear reaction than was put in, we said: “Proponents argue that fusion is much safer than nuclear fission, the process that powers all existing nuclear energy plants (and nuclear weapons).”

As Roger Thetford pointed out, early atomic weapons, such as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, used fission; but later hydrogen bombs use fission to trigger a fusion reaction that causes the main explosion. So we deleted the reference to nuclear weapons.

In another article on the same subject, we quoted Dr Robbie Scott, of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Central Laser Facility Plasma Physics Group, who contributed to the research: “Fusion has the potential to provide a near-limitless, safe, clean, source of carbon-free baseload energy. It cannot be understated what a huge breakthrough this is for laser fusion research.”