Great Balls of Fire Click - Short Edition

In around ten minutes it's time for Newswatch,

Energy - as our demand for it grows, the world is faced with a challenge.

When we burn coal, the energy that has been stored inside formally

-- for millions of years is released, to power

But so, of course, is all the bad stuff that is polluting

Countries have met and agreed to reduce carbon emissions

and invest in clean energy solutions.

We are harnessing more solar and wind energy than ever,

and last month the UK had its first day of electricity supply

But green power is still a long way from taking over from fossil fuels.

But what if there was a clean energy source that could release 10 million

times more energy than fossil fuels, with an almost limitless supply

which could keep the planet running for millions of years?

Well, turns out, there is, and the answer lies in the stars.

In the heart of the Sun, under intense pressure and heat,

hydrogen atoms change from gas into superhot plasma,

and, in this burning soup, they fuse together forming helium,

and releasing immense amounts of energy.

This is nuclear fusion and this is what scientists have been trying

for more than 60 years to recreate down here on Earth.

We have to do something similar to a star, which has gravity,

and to do that we use magnetic fields.

And we're talking about magnetic fields that create

more pressure than the water pressure at the bottom

So you've got this huge pressure trying to compress the plasma,

and you've got to hold it in place for a very long time as well, to get

If you can keep the superhot plasma in place for long enough,

the energy released can keep everything hot, without the need

The fusion then becomes self-sustaining, that's

We are making progress, though, we have already achieved fusion,

and some of the best fusion happens inside machines called tokamaks.

Now this one is just outside Oxford, which turns out to be

a bit of an epicentre for fusion technology.

The world's largest tokamak is just 15 minutes up that way.

There is a problem with these machines, and that is that you end

up having to put much more energy into these things than you ever

But the company here is taking a different route.

This is the lab of Tokamak Energy, which is developing relatively small

Smaller prototypes can be tested and improved much

quicker and more cheaply, as the science is understood

This approach means the team may be the first to work out how to produce

Oh! My word!

Inside here, we are generating plasma, which is gas

with electricity flowing through it and we're going to fuse atoms

together, join them together, to generate fusion energy.

And this light show isn't even fusion.

This is just a warm up which is hoped will happen

And then what we're going to do is heated up to over

10 million degrees, up towards 100 million degrees...

We won't be able to keep our face this close

We will have to be further away outside some sort

But it will actually start to go transparent,

as the plasma gets really hot, ten times the temperature

of the Sun, 100 times the temperature of the sun.

Once they have achieved the temperatures, they need to keep

the plasma in place long enough for it to become self-sustaining

and this is what the team hopes will create magnetic fields

Instead of thick copper cables, a strip of super-thin superconductor

All this sounds hopeful, but the joke is that nuclear fusion

If successful, it will mean the end of our reliance on fossil fuels,

but there's still a lot of science to do between now and then.

It could be a fantastic source of energy, likely to be the most

important source of energy in the 22nd century.

The point is, we need it now, and so we want to make faster

It is one of the biggest fund-raising events of the year.

Nearly 40,000 people ran this year's London Marathon and wealth funds

are still being counted, organisers are hopeful

they will smash last year's record of ?59 million raised.

Online fundraising platforms now play a big role

in attracting more donations, pushing the charities' causes

across to users whilst also enabling them to give money

JustGiving, one of the biggest players, raised just under

This is a figure that charities may not have been able to raise

without these sites, but these donations are also big business.

JustGiving takes up to 5% commission, whilst others,

They say the fees cover operational costs and innovations to ultimately

But for charities, this commission is money that's not

So the majority of our funding comes from individual fundraisers.

For example, one of our runners is currently on ?1500,

and the commission on that is going to be about ?100.

And on the ground, that translates into care for ten kids that

could have received a top to toe checkup,

HIV testing and TB testing and be insured their

Starfish is a small charity which helps vulnerable

children in South Africa, who are affected by HIV and poverty,

and a lot of its money goes into running a mobile health clinic.

In the UK, the charity Big Kid helps vulnerable young people in south

Both organisations have been experimenting with Kind Link,

a site which promises to give charities although collected

donations and will not make its money from commissions.

I went to meet its founder, Iskren Kulev, who traded

in corporate life and set up a home office, just

KindLink didn't start as a company, KindLink started as an idea to be

a social enterprise/charity that helps charities.

For him, it's all about transparency.

He wanted to create a platform where charities would post updates.

The biggest problem with the charities is how

they communicate with their donors and

do the donors trust were the money is going?

About 70% of donors say they would make more if they knew

what was happening with their donation.

They have also added a feature to show people how much money

the charity has received and how much it has spent.

How has your background in financial tech helped you to put this together

and also maybe to work the system a bit, because it's all about making

money, making money now not for businesses but for good causes.

It's always a matter of negotiation, I would say.

I will go firstly through volume is important, how you present

When I know where they can make a compromise, I can try to come up

with a deal which would work for both of us.

See, this is a guy you want on your side, because he knows how

And so far it's s proving successful, with more than 170

How would you improve on what you are doing on the pitch?

For Big Kid, it's able to spend more money on its programs,

like this one, which trains young people to be football coaches.

It has helped me, definitely, especially with school

In school, I wasn't the good kid, if you understand.

Well, instead of taking commission from donors,

it plans to take the money from businesses.

They have developed this platform for companies to build

a profile for themselves showcasing the good causes they support

The companies will be charged a monthly fee.

I think it is quite fitting that KindLink have set themselves up

just across the river from Canary Wharf, where

the financial industry makes its billions.

And I think it takes a certain kind of person to give

all that up and come over here and work for charities.

Hello, and welcome to the week in tech.

It was the week that Microsoft released an urgent software update

after discovering a flaw in the windows operating system.

The bug could give hackers access, by simply sending an e-mail,

A 16-year-old's tweet about chicken nuggets became

A US plane arrived after being top secret.

Having landed at the Kennedy space Centre, all that the Pentagon

declared about the Air Force's robotic mini space shuttle

is that it was performing risk reduction, experimentation

and concept of operations development.

And, finally, Hollywood quality animation comes to the masses.

The Smartsuit Pro with camera free motion tracking system costs

a fraction of the pro kit, but at $2,500 it could prove game

changing for independent movie-makers and game designers.

That's it for the short version of click this week. The full version is

up on iPlayer for you to watch right now. Next week will be rather epic,

so find time for that. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook corrupt the

week if you would be so kind. Thanks for watching and see you soon!