Sun In A Bottle by Charles Seife

From The Week of March 13, 2011

In the last 250 years, humanity has made incalculable advances in countless fields of knowledge and understanding. We have harnessed electricity, built computers, flown airplanes and even rocketed ourselves into outer space. But while this progress is both wonderful and astonishing, every aspect of our modern world relies upon a single, unavoidable necessity, power. At first, our muscles provided that power: fashioning spears, sharpening knives, capturing food. But then we advanced to horse-power, to run us across vast distances, steam power to propel our ships, coal to warm our homes, oil to fuel our cars, and electricity to light up our cities. But now we've maximized that output. Computers, devices, cars, rockets... All our greatest technologies are leashed by the restraints of the power we can supply them. So what's the answer? What's next? What can free our inventions from the shackles of limited power?

Here, Mr. Seife, a writer of popular science, explores the holy grail of power generation, nuclear fusion. Unlike fission, which is the process of unleashing energy as a result of tearing atoms apart, fusion creates usable energy by smashing atoms together to create fewer, bigger atoms. This process has continuously powered the sun, and every other star we know of, for billions of years, failing only when their internal supply of fuel (hydrogen) runs out. But while we have mastered fission, fusion, the cleaner and more powerful of the two, has proven far more elusive. In order to generate synthetic (read man-made) fusion and confine it to a power plant, it is necessary to heat the fuel to enormous temperatures -- in the neighborhood of 100,000,000 degrees -- to ignite the process. Therefore, chambers capable of containing such temperatures have to be built, and shaped, and made to withstand these temperatures and pressures for years at a time, without fail. It is a feat of engineering unmatched in human endeavor.

Mr. Seife dives into the history of fusion power, laying out the fundamentals of its science before turning his powers of examination upon the various human attempts to harness it. From the hoaxes to the eureka moments, from the un-reproducible successes to ITER and NIF, Mr. Seife, with admirable clarity and brevity, sketches out the close calls and the premature declarations of success in this field of science upon which everything hinges. He leaves little doubt that the over-eagerness of scientists to solve for fusion has set the industry back decades. And yet, there's a hopefulness that endures here in spite of all the disappointments, an awareness of fusion's importance that fuels excitement about how it could change our world. This is thorough and fascinating work. (3/5 Stars)