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Will we ever get fusion power?
“Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy. Why shouldn’t we?”
Most researchers had initially considered the Soviet tokamak, which required both enormous magnets and a large electrical current through the plasma, a complex and cumbersome device, unlikely to make for a successful power reactor. While this was far below the plasma conditions needed for a power reactor, it represented substantial progress: The troubled Model C stellarator had only managed to achieve temperatures of one million degrees and confinement times of one thousandth of a second. Rather than a detailed model of the underlying behavior of the plasma, progress on fusion began to take place by the application of “scaling laws,” empirical relationships between the size and shape of a tokamak and various measures of performance.
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