I have an article on the nuclear fusion reactor being built in the south of France in this week’s New Statesman. ITER ( the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an incredible project – the idea is to build something on Earth that operates at 150 million degrees, but generates useable, controllable energy through the same process that powers the sun.
The most interesting aspect of researching the piece was the fact that scientific objections are incredibly thin on the ground. There have been objections in the past, but now the project seems to have gathered enough evidence that it might just work.
It’s still an incredible longshot, though: a whole lot of factors have to come together to make it work. As someone said, "we're trying to put the sun in a box - but we don't know how to build the box." Others have been more directly scathing, and called it “the science of wishful thinking”. Charles Seife’s book The Sun In A Bottle, for instance, concludes that, "so long as there are other energy sources available, fusion is unlikely to make a huge dent in humanity’s energy needs.” (It's a great book, by the way – Charles is an incredibly gifted writer)
For decades, people have joked that nuclear fusion is “just forty years away – and has been for forty years”. I don’t think that’s quite fair any more. Having said that, when you read the New Statesman article, you’ll find that it is still forty years away. At least...
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