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

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Should we question science?

I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...

Search This Blog