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.

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Review by Brian Clegg
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