Review: March 2009

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The recipe is enticingly simple. Take four hydrogen nuclei and push them together to form a single helium nucleus. Voilà—energy! We know this takes place in nature—inside the Sun—so why not harness the same reaction to power our furnaces, generators, and automobiles?

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to get hydrogen to behave. Bring positively charged hydrogen nuclei close to each other, and their mutual electric repulsion resists compression like a powerful spring, keeping them too far apart to form any helium. Inside the Sun, enormous pressures and high temperatures overcome that difficulty, but reproducing the same conditions in the laboratory has frustrated scientists for the past half century.

Science journalist Charles Seife details these efforts to harness the Sun, from the first donut-shaped magnetic device envisioned by Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer in the 1950s to the multibillion-dollar ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), a mammoth international collaboration that has been proceeding in fits and starts since the Reagan years. But like the proverbial skeptic who sees the hole, not the donut, Seife relishes writing about the egregious failures of fusion research, not its hard-won successes.

These stories run the gamut of human frailties, from hubris to fraud. In March 1951, Argentina’s president Juan Perón announced that his country had solved the energy crisis: a scientist named Ronald Richter had achieved fusion in what amounted to little more than a stone furnace. Experts, however, found a light-show worthy of the Wizard of Oz and Richter was ultimately arrested.

Poor Richter was, as Seife notes, "the first casualty of the quest to put the sun in a bottle," but hardly the last. Hopefully, when the ultimate history of fusion energy is written, Seife’s tragicomic tales of folly will appear as mere footnotes, rather than as poignant testimony to the futility of bottling the Sun.