Sun

We live close to a gravity stabilised unshielded nuclear fusion reactor. So close to it, that you can make out its disk in the sky. Surely this is clearly a risky strategy for a planet with a paper thin atmosphere* but I guess that's how its been for a few billion years.

Midsummer Sunrise (a favourite subject of mine) at Hampstead Marshall, west of Newbury near the river Kennet. This giant and potentially lethal reactor rises above the horizon.

Sunset, Spring Equinox. I once lived in a house where my view to the horizon between the houses was due west. Every year the Sun would set in the gap at the right time. How does it know it should do that, eh?

Here is one from just last night. A January sunset from the end window at the office over North Hampshire. Our neighbourhood fusion reactor gives the clouds a golden lining, while the rooks perch in the tops of the trees to survey the scene.

I confess have some previous form with nuclear fusion. My first job on leaving school in the late 1960s was as a junior technician at UKAEA Culham Labs in Oxfordshire (now the home of the JET experiment). I worked on one of the Fusion experiments there maintaining and designing electronics. I remember being told that limitless cheap electricity, courtesy of a man made fusion reactor, was only about thirty years away. Clearly the problem has proved to be more difficult than expected. Aah, happy days....

Culham lab (pictured in 1970) was built on an old wartime airfield. It was a part of the Harwell group of labs and concentrated on world class Fusion research. These days it seems rather more like a private venture science park.

* Apparently if you imagine the Earth as the size of a Basketball, our atmosphere would be the thickness of a few sheets of paper. Makes you think, doesn't it...