Star Power - Alain Bécoulet **

This book was a disappointment - more on that in a moment. The aim is to give us the picture of the development of nuclear fusion as a power source leading up to the latest and best incarnation of a fusion reactor, ITER. In principle, fusion offers us the best option to balance out the variability of wind and solar - an on-demand energy supply that is green and doesn't produce the same level of nuclear waste as fission. But the timescales are mind-numbing.

Fusion energy has already been in development for over 60 years. ITER, a project that was first conceived 34 years ago is expected to fully operational by 2035 with experiments continuing for 20 years. This would take it to 67 years from first conception. And ITER isn't even a prototype for a working power station - that's the next stage. In part, Alain Bécoulet does give us a picture of why things have taken so long - because, for example, handling the lively, ultra hot plasma at the heart of a magnetic confinement reactor has proved far trickier than was first anticipated. But even so, given the urgency of getting away from fossil fuels, speed is of the essence, yet Bécoulet hardly mentions the many competitors to the ITER route (the equivalent of only mentioning NASA and omitting SpaceX for example), and doesn't explain why those in the mainstream programme haven't done far more parallel development to get things moving quicker.

The detail on the problems with handling plasma (and how it wasn't anticipated) is the highlight of this book - I haven't seen such detail elsewhere. But unfortunately, Star Power falls down as a readable text. There are three broad issues - the use of language (which may be influenced by the book being translated from the original French), huge tracts of vagueness interspersed with unnecessary technical detail, and lack of an effective structure to carry the narrative through.

A random example of the clunky prose and vagueness (not the worst) would be 'Everything would turn out well in this best of turbulent worlds if efforts to achieve optimal plasma performance were not limited by nature - to wit, by certain fundamental mechanisms at work involving currents, pressures, and magnetic fields. We can approach this vexed field of endeavour by calling to mind a few scenes familiar from high-school science classes.'

In the end, although I wanted to know what this book has to say, I didn't enjoy reading it. I ploughed on regardless, but it wasn't a great experience.

Hardback:

Bookshop.org

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
-
See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied), the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Search This Blog