Fusion's Promise - Matthew Moynihan and Alfred Bortz ***

Nuclear fusion, as this book reminds us, has been on the cards as a potential safe, clean, green energy source for around 60 years - but still isn't a practical solution. Even so, we're a lot closer now to making it a reality, so it's helpful to have a technical backgrounder on what has happened so far and how far we have to go.

This book sits on the borderline between popular science and textbook lite. So, for example, although it has no maths in it, in the first section on plasma physics we are plunged into fairly sophisticated detail. Page 5, for example, features a graph showing the 'Comparison of the strong nuclear force between two nucleons and the electrostatic repulsion (Coulomb's inverse square law) between two protons'. It's hard to see how this diagram betters a sentence explaining it, adding visual complexity where none is required.

A little later in the same section, we get what's described as a 'deep dive into plasma models', starting with one particle and building through fluid dynamics and ideal magnetohydrodynamics to two fluids... and we're still only at page 26. We then go on to fusion technologies, with a comprehensive range of possibilities - there's a whole section, for example, on cusp systems (and who couldn't get excited about biconic cusps?). About halfway through the book we hit tokamaks, variants of them and inertial confinement, followed by a couple more obscure technologies.

In some ways, because it's most intriguing, the best bit is the final, short 'the path forward' section. Most exotically, this briefly includes the subject hinted at in the book's extraordinarily long subtitle, in a sub-section entitled 'To Mars and back'. This mentions the, possibly a little unlikely, idea of a fusion-driven rocket where plasma is blasted out of the back to provide thrust. We have enough trouble getting fusion going in a massive ground-based reactor - making it portable is arguably a very long way off.

If you want a popular science introduction to the topic, I'd be more inclined to go for Sharon Ann Holgate's Nuclear Fusion, but if you want to get into more depth and don't mind ploughing through a lot of detail, Fusion's Promise is a good source and well worth taking a look at. It's the most comprehensive summary I've seen at the descriptive level, though probably not the most exciting read.

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically? Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Search This Blog