The Fusion Myth

摘要

Dreams of a Utopian future have driven decades of research into fusion power, the explosive union of atomic nuclei that fuels the stars and liberates colossal quantities of energy. Its pursuit has pushed scientists to the abyss, spawned crackpot schemes (nuke the moon!), and given rise to reactors with names like the Stellarator, the Thermotron, and the Perhapsatron. Although no fusion reactor has ever produced more energy than it consumes, every new advance, real or imagined-cold fusion, bubble fusion, microfusion bombs-is met by media frenzy. In his Sun in aBottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, Charles Seife has no doubt why: "Fusion is as close as science gets to something for nothing. It offers a theoretically clean, perfectly free, inexhaustible source of energy that nothing else offers. As soon as the theory was born-that you could make atoms stick together and get energy -scientists said, 'We have to make it work.'"