Every so often, there is an Energy Award programme by either Eskom or some other body. They have a competition and the winner is announced and, often, the ‘new’ idea is, in fact, one which was first thought of some 200 years ago.

An ‘innovation’ that I saw recently was a box which worked on an evaporative cooling system – basically, a tin inside a tin, with the space between the two filled with fibre and water. The water evaporates and the inner tin becomes cool. The system was used at about the time of the Crimean War, in 1853, but, like a comet, returned to become the invention of some school child at a modern energy award function, complete with photographs and gushing narrative along the lines of: “Aw, shucks; why didn’ we think o that?”

I read recently about a young reader who had sent to a newspaper science correspondent a query along the lines of: “Apart from the fact that crashing an aircraft with a nuclear reactor on board might cause seriously bad press fallout (Ha! Ha!), why not have a nuclear-powered aircraft?” The science correspondent replied to the effect that nuclear reactors were very big, see? Could go crash and make the world brighter for a few seconds, see? And while the average passenger was quite willing to be in a limb-tearing fiery holocaust if the aircraft crashed, few wanted to be in a nuclear plane crash with their bodies vapourised and their remains swept up and buried in a matchbox.

This is, in fact, all rubbish. Nuclear-powered aircraft are quite possible. They won’t happen because of the US legal system. I’ll explain: the Cessna 172, probably the most widely sold light aircraft in the world, has two magnetos as part of the ignition system. A magneto is a permanent magnet generator that produces sparks. Magnetos have traditionally been used in aircraft engines. This keeps the ignition system independent of the battery and charging system and keeps the engine running in the event of alternator or battery failure. Or so they say.

The fact is that one could very easily use an electronic ignition system in an aircraft engine but they do not do this, I believe, because, if they did, they would have to face a whole slew of nonprecedent-based lawsuits from people who crashed Cessna airplanes and claimed this was due to the engine failing owing to the ignition system failing. (You think not? Just one of the lawsuits recently decided in favour of the plaintiff was when McDonald’s was sued by a woman who spilt her McDonald’s coffee in her lap. She claimed that she was burnt and sued McDonald’s for the coffee being too hot. She won.)

You can imagine the snowstorm of litigation which would follow a crash by a nuclear- powered aircraft and, quite clearly, it is not going to happen any time soon.

Behind the scenes, there are a whole lot of really good ideas which could happen but, owing to the possibility of lawsuits, won’t. For example, it is quite possible to make fully automatic trains and cars and buses that will take you where you want, driverless (in fact, the Paris metro is fully auto- matic but has a driver to make sure that people are clear of the doors before they close).

But then again, the possibilities for trivial lawsuits remain. One of the problems I have with the ‘energy awards’ is that very few of the ideas are new. The reason they have not been developed is that there are commercial reasons for not doing so, one of which is the possibility of legal action if the thing goes wrong.

It is a good and great thing to encourage young minds to expand and think big but it would be much better if those young minds, firstly, learned what has been done historically and, secondly, really thought about what could be done and why it has not been done so far.

If we don’t do this, then all we do is hand out money for ideas which are neither new nor workable.