Fusion works. If it didn’t, the sun wouldn’t shine, and H-bombs wouldn’t explode.
Harnessing fusion for electricity production is just an engineering problem.
” … [T]he enormous potential of fusion makes it hard to ignore. It’s a technology that could safely provide an immense and steady torrent of electricity, harnessing abundant fuel made from seawater …. It would produce no greenhouse gases and minimal waste compared to conventional energy sources,” a Vox article says (here), and as an added benefit “it is almost impossible to cause a runaway reaction or meltdown … like Chernobyl” because if “a fusion reactor is disrupted, the reaction rapidly fizzles out.”
So a lot of money is being spent — some argue not enough — on enormous experimental fusion machines (photo below), trying to capture that elusive “star in a bottle.” This one, at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, uses lasers to heat a fuel pellet to a plasma state.
“I’m a true believer. I do think we can solve this problem,” said Troy Carter, a UCLA plasma physicist. “It will take time, but the real issue is getting the resources brought to bear on these issues.”
Inevitable or not, practical energy production from fusion is at best still decades away. Meanwhile, fusion research produces practical benefits for, among other things, making semiconductors. “Plasma processing is one of the things that make your iPhones possible,” an Oak Ridge National Laboratory fusion researcher said.
