WHAT IF...WE CRACK FUSION AND SOLVE OUR ENERGY PROBLEM?

摘要

We already live in a world powered by nuclear fusion. Unfortunately the reactor is 150 million kilometres away and we haven't worked out an efficient way to tap it directly. So we burn its fossilised energy - coal, oil and gas - which is slowly boiling the planet alive, like a frog in a pan of water. Recreating the sun on Earth would go a long way to solving that problem, but it is a biggie. Research started more than 60 years ago; the leading fusion reactor design, the tokamak, is half a century old. Tokamaks trap heavy hydrogen isotopes inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic field, heating and squeezing the plasma so that deuterium and tritium fuse to release energy. After testing a series of increasingly large tokamaks, fusion researchers agreed 10 years ago to build a huge one in France called ITER.