Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...