Fusion

Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy is the story of the international race to build the first atomic fusion reactor. It is the story of a fraternity of scientists, whose members included such greats as Andrei Sakharov and Edward Teller. Transcending political boundaries, their utopian mission was to create a source of safe, clean, inexhaustible energy from the elements of seawater. The book abounds with fascinating anecdotes about fusion’s rocky path: the spurious claim by Argentine dictator Juan Peron in 1951 that his country had built a working fusion reactor; the rush by the United States to drop secrecy and publicize its fusion work as a propaganda offensive after the Russian success with Sputnik; the fortune the Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione sank into an unconventional fusion device; the scepticism that met an assertion by two University of Utah chemists in 1989 that they had created ‘cold fusion’ in a bottle. Aimed at a general audience, the book describes the scientific basis of controlled fusion - the fusing of atomic nuclei, under conditions hotter than the sun, to release energy. Using personal recollections of scientists involved, the book traces the history of this little-known international race that began during the Cold War in secret laboratories in the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and evolved into an astonishingly open collaboration between East and West.