12/01/2014 Reporters

homes. Now it is time for Reporters.

Welcome to this Reporters special on the future of fuel. I am in Beijing.

We have come to China, the world's largest energy user, to look at the

challenges that lie ahead. To explore some of the possible

solutions for meeting the surge in demand for energy both here and

around the world. In this programme, China, the

world's largest polluter is trying to go green. Becoming the leader in

wind power. It used to take two base to make one turbine. Now we can make

two in a day. In America, the new technique in fracking leads to a

boom in shale gas, transforming the market.

And we meet the scientist researching an idea borrowed from

nature. Investigating an alternative nuclear

fuel. Safer than uranium and more abundant. I am standing on top of

the reactor itself. Now there is where the thorium has been tested.

And the future of fusion. The world's most ambitious project to

recreate the power of the sun. We are going to be taking a pair of

atoms and then forcing or fusing them together. That will release

even more energy. China uses more energy than any

other country in the world. At that also means it is a major source of

pollution. The quality of the air is a real concern for people here. Many

check online every day to get the latest pollution data. The Chinese

government is investing $300 billion trying to clear up. I have been

investigating the scale of the problem and what can be done about

it. There are good days in China. Look

at one of the many bad ones. The editor is a toxic grey. The smog

choking this treats content products linked to asthma and heart trouble.

It may be taking five years of the average lifespan. So to venture

outside in the Chinese winter, these twin girls do not just eat coats.

Their mother wants them to wear facemasks. Like many, she is scared

of the area they have to breathe. TRANSLATION: There are so many

people and cars here, affecting the children's health. She is even

thinking of moving away. You cannot actually see some of the most

damaging pollution. It involves particles that are microscopically

small. Let us use virtual reality to visualise them. They are less than

2.5 mu. Across. You could fit 400 in a single millimetre. By comparison,

a grain of sand is 20 times larger. This matters, because the particles

are small enough not just to get into the lungs, but also into the

bloodstream. This kind of pollution is measured by the cubic metre of

air. That is visualise that right here. The World Health Organisation

sets a maximum limit of 25 of these particles in this space. And says we

should not breathe more than over a 24-hour period. But a of 200 is

routinely reached in many Chinese cities. It wants to -- wants peaked

at 800. So what are the authorities doing? They are closing down the

power plants that use call. Next, they are trying to limit road

traffic. Officials say they are confident they can clean up.

TRANSLATION: Many cities in the world had air problems in the past.

London was nicknamed smog city. At the air is much better now. We have

already moved fast to combat the problem. But some organisations are

taking matters into their own hands. The International School of Beijing

has sealed off part of its playground. Inside this vast,

inflatable dome, the children are breathing filtered air. It is

reassuring for the parents. It is one of the first questions that

respective families will ask during the admissions process during the

tour of the facility. What is the air quality inside? People actually

ask? Yes. The very worst smog forces the entire city to close down. Rapid

growth has an ugly downside. The government is banking on green

technology for the future. Pollution will be a reality here for years to

come. What of the power behind China's

boom has come from coal. But it is also a major source of pollution and

releases the gas is responsible for global warming. One of the responses

has been a massive push for renewable energy. We have been out

to the far west to see some of the country's largest wind farms. Out in

the frozen deserts. Everything about China is on a

massive scale. When they decide to go for wind energy, you end up with

windfarms on a truly epic scale. I am in the far west of the country.

Because it is winter the Desert is frozen. They are installing

thousands of these things every year. It is part of the push for

renewable energy the world has ever seen. It is not much went today. The

blades are hardly toning. That makes it ideal conditions for installing

more of these. The wind has picked up, but there are still planning to

go ahead and install this next one. This played a suspended just above

the ground has been connected to the hub. A crane is ready to hoist the

whole thing right up to the top of that power. What is remarkable is

how they have accelerated the process. A few years ago it took

them two days to install one, now they can do one in a single day. Our

timelapse camera has captured the process in action. High-speed,

increasingly efficient, happening more and more across China. Let us

take a look behind the scenes. This is an assembly plant. It is hard to

get your head around these. But picture the massive blades attached

to them and the whole thing mounted on top of those powers we have

seen. The investment in wind in China is so massive that these

companies are driving down prices and coming up with their own

innovations. It is a globally important force. There's also a

great sense of pride about this technology. One of the guys who

works here, even to his bride on their wedding day, went out to pose

for pick is. Here they are, the happy couple. Not many countries

would see a scene like this. Modern China, with its gleaming

skyscrapers, has an insatiable appetite for a energy. That is why

there is interest in a new way of getting hold of oil and gas. That

technique is fracking. The process of breaking up Shale Rock to release

fossil fuels. It was pioneered in America. There, the Shale gas boom

has led to read dramatic fall in prices. I have been to a new

frontier in the south of Texas. A glimpse of the underworld, a view

of the geology beneath our feet. This is the latest way to discover

Shale, a type of rock that is transforming the future of fuel. It

has changed the face of the energy picture in the US. In 2007 we were

looking at importing gas. But because of the Shale gas revolution,

in 2013 we are looking at exporting gas. Southern Texas is one Shale gas

frontier. America now produces more gas than Russia. The key is

fracking. Breaking up the Shale. Tracking has been around for years.

But new techniques keep making it easier to get a hold of the gas that

flies -- lies underground. They turn the drill horizontally and run it to

break through the layer. The aim is to get tiny fissures in the rock.

Some are less than one millimetre across. Inside them are tiny

molecules of gas. Water and chemicals are pumped in at high

pressure. This is to widen those fishes. -- fisheries. Tiny grains

are added to the mix. There are designed to hold the cracks open.

This release is the gas. It is then flushed through the drill pipe and

back up. New research is enhancing how this process happens all the

time. This means there is a Shale gas boom under way. A mass of

machinery. One risk of fracking is tremors. They are very rare. Another

risk is polluting the water. If the work is not done carefully in open

country there are few objections. But it is controversial close to

home. We now have this oilfield. This man had fracking rate on his

doorstep. Just beside his house in California. The company involved

would not comment. Fracking was for oil, not gas, but the process was

the same. It was a major inconvenience because of the

activity around the clock. As well as the smell, the dust, the amount

of trucks, the noise. But fracking is worth billions. This tunnel in

Louisiana, built to import gas, is now being converted to exploit.

American Shale gas will be sent from here to Britain, Spain and other

countries. Potentially huge business. So fracking operations are

speeding up, with more than 1 million in America so far. There is

a lot of opposition. But with huge demand, a gold rush is on. With

plans making energy and they can make it efficiently. Why can't we

copied? That is what some scientists are trying to achieve with a form of

artificial photosynthesis. That is the prose is where these combined

carbon dioxide, sunlight and water to create a kind of fuel. Alistair

was shown research in California that is about green power. Some of

the world's biggest trees tower above Northern California. Thousand

-year-old redwoods reach these lofty heights simply by typing the

incredible power of the sun. Imagine if we humans could do that. If we

could survive without burning fossil fuels, the remains of trees and

plants from millions of years ago that worries about global warming

would be over. That is where artificial third -- photosynthesis

comes in. Man-made believes they could generate all the energy

required and the technology is closer than you may think. Bubbles.

Bowles in a bottle. By their and water, generating a gas which could

be burned as fuel. What we demonstrating here is the splitting

of water, the hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight. What I could

undersell beef, turning air and water into the sugars that fuel the

growth while taking out the time when -- carbon dioxide which warms

the planet. With the -- this technology working competitively

against fossil fuels we could reduce the rate at which the carbon dioxide

levels in the atmosphere are increasing and stop the separation

of climate change that we are now seeing. It would be world changing

and in every meaning of that word. This lad is one of the US

government's five energy innovation hubs. Confining chemists, biologist,

physicists and engineers to develop solar panels which can create fuel

rather than electricity. They have cutting-edge tools, to build new

materials, molecule by molecule. Nanotechnology is making artificial

plans possible. What is different about us is we are trying to take

all of this beautiful science and put together to build a working

prototype and a working prototype would be a foundation for a

technology end technology would then be a foundation for an industry that

would supply these fuels for us. This is really baby steps at the

very beginning of the journey. Scientists across the world are

chasing the technology but this US lab are planning to have a

practical, working prototype within the year. And in a lifetime, to be

generating hydrocarbon fuels like methanol ten times more efficient

leaves NHL. It is a fuel of the future that could be truly world

changing. One important energy choice by China is to go for nuclear

power and they are building dozens of new reactors. They will be

fuelled by uranium. The problem is, it is pretty expensive and leaves a

legacy of radioactive waste. Scientists are searching an

alternative nuclear fuel. It is called thorium. The adventures are

is that it is abundant, leaves little waste and its byproducts

cannot be used to make a nuclear bomb. There is a story test centre

in Norway. -- thorium. The gentle hills of southern Norway, forged 600

million years ago from the fire and ash of a super volcano. It left a

hidden bounty for mankind. That is the opening to the mine. Sentries at

iron have been hewn from this rock that a man with a geiger counter

shows that the walls inside our field with a radioactive element.

Thorium, high levels of thorium in this rock. If it is radioactive,

could thorium be used as a nuclear fuel instead of its volatile cousin,

uranium. Scientists are trying to find out. Tests are ongoing under

this hill. There is a nuclear reactor in the belly of the Mt. It

is likely on that movie. A private firm is being held by the British

Government to trial thorium here. I am standing on top of the reactor

itself. If I looked down the whole I can see the top of the reactor down

below me. It is turned off and now for maintenance I say. Down there is

where the thorium has been tested and the firm says that so far the

experiments are going well. Similar tests are being carried out in

India, China and Japan. Several nations assess the potential of

thorium. There is a lot of thorium in the world, well distributed all

over the world. In operations in the reactor, it there are chemical and

physical properties that make it really superior than uranium as

well. On the wayside we do not generate a new long-lived waste.

There is a potential safety benefit, too. When this an army hit

the uranium fuelled Fukushima plant two years ago, the reaction spun out

of control. Scientists in Norway said it would not have happened with

thorium. Critics say developing thorium will be expensive and will

not produce clean energy for their gates. The abundance of thorium is

political. The technology is into the future by decades. They should

focus on developing new technology, offshore technology which has huge

potential to develop. Politicians depend on nuclear technologies, they

think that thorium bears further inspection. This next one is a long

way off. China and other leading countries are spending a lot of

money on fusion, for decades fusion has offered the dream of almost

limitless power. It is the process that goes on inside the sun, atoms

reinforced together to release energy. China is a partner in the

most ambitious attempt so far to try to make this work. It is under

construction in the south of France and I was given special access. At

one of the world's largest construction sites, a dream for

future energy is taking place. This is a project called it and it is

trying something it shortly, building a machine that copies --

that produces energy by copying the process that happens in the sun. It

is the process known as fusion. Fusion promises a live energy for

the planet. When we make it work, we will demonstrate it from a

scientific and technology point of view that fusion energy can produce

large-scale power. The vision is for a new kind of reactor which in

theory is easy to fuel and leaves little greenhouse gas. Because of

the potential, it is backed by Europe, America, China and India,

Russia and Japan and South Korea. More than half of the world's

population sharing the cost of ?13 billion. To explain how this is

going to work, let's use virtual reality. In a normal nuclear

reactor, you take an atom and split it. This releases energy. It is the

process known as fission. What they do is the opposite. They want to

take pairs of atoms and forcing or fusing them together and this will

release more energy. It is what is known as fusion and it is the

process that goes on inside the sun. Now, there is only one way to

contain this. They will create an enormous magnetic field. It will sit

here like a giant ring and inside that, the fusion, all of the atoms

being forced together will take place right in the middle. If this

works, it will be a major step to showing that fusion can be a viable

source of power. There is a very long way to go. Here is one they

built earlier. A par that plant known as jet in Oxfordshire. It is

pioneering the research. I was shown around the tangle of pipes and

cables that swirl around the reactor. Everything about this

technology is challenging. This is the strange sight of the process in

action. They have got fusion to work but not on a scale that yet makes

any kind of financial sense. We have word that it is scientifically

feasible to generate energy from fusion, what we have not yet learnt

is whether we can do that at a commercial rate that you want to pay

for your electricity. Fusion energy was first promise in the 1950s and

it is still decades away. This is where we will see the power of the

sun when it can be repeated on her. -- on earth. That is all from the

special edition of reporters, looking at the future of fuel. From

me in the Chinese capital, Beijing, goodbye.

Yesterday was a lovely, sunny winter 's day. We are paying the price of a

widespread frost. It will be a cold start today. We will see some cloud

and eventually some rain coming in from the West. You can see clearly

on the satellite picture. It is looming large. The satellite

picture. It is looming large.