Can this Made in Chelsea star harness the power of nuclear fusion?

Long involvement in The Spectator’s Economic Innovator Awards has taught me that entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. Even so, when I met the founder of a British rocket-science venture called Pulsar Fusion, I was looking for a bespectacled boffin rather than someone I might have presumed was a musical-theatre actor – or a star of one of those TV reality shows populated only by the young, fit and blond, such as Made In Chelsea.

Well, guess what: 35-year-old Richard Dinan actually was a star of Made in Chelsea and he has the teeth, hair and cheekbones to prove it. But he’s also been a serial start-up entrepreneur since he was 16 and now he’s a self-taught astrophysicist as well. ‘Not really a scientist,’ he explains with a hint of apology. ‘But I’ve always loved technology and building things. I guess I’m a natural engineer.’

Bypassing university, Dinan trained briefly as a gunsmith before venturing into 3D printing, robotics, high-frequency trading and fintech. When in his late twenties he began to make money, ‘not spectacular but enough’, he didn’t blow iton fast cars or Chelsea girls. Instead, he ‘hired some physicists and started asking them difficult questions’. Fascinated by asteroids and meteorites – ‘hydrogen cooked into iron, the waste product of stars’ – he had found his life’s passion in the esoteric field of nuclear fusion.

What’s nuclear fusion? If you’re guessing something to do with power-station technology, you’re not entirely wrong – you’re just three or four decades too early. Sometime in the second half of this century, fusion could indeed become the source of the abundant clean energy that human civilisation will need to survive.

But it’s not what drives Hinkley Point and Sizewell today. That is nuclear fission – the splitting of atoms to release energy. Fusion, sometimes described as ‘the process that drives the stars’, is the opposite use of the same natural phenomena: the fusing together of different forms of hydrogen atom at ultra-high temperatures (millions of degrees Celsius, that is) to release colossal amounts of energy that could eventually drive turbines to generate electricity.