Fusion enthusiasts anticipate a day in the next century when reactors, by slamming together hydrogen atoms, will generate virtually limitless amounts of energy without soot-belching smokestacks or radioactive waste. The good news on the fusion front is that last fall an experimental reactor in England produced a record 16 million watts. The bad news is that over 24 million watts went into the reactor. Physicist Hendrik Monkhorst of the University of Florida in Gainesville is pessimistic about the prospects for current research. Instead he is excited by a novel fusion scheme, one that he believes will be a clean, cheap source of power.
The record-setting English reactor, the Joint European Torus in Abingdon, like many experimental fusion reactors, uses powerful magnetic fields to confine clouds, or plasmas, of charged hydrogen in a large doughnut-shaped chamber. The fields strip electrons away from the hydrogen and smash the hydrogen atoms together. Each ...
