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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.

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