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By Root 1355 0

was clearly out of reach. There was no way, with budgets as they were, that fusion scientists could ever hope to build a magnetic fusion reactor. A tokamak big enough and powerful enough to keep a plasma burning indefinitely would cost billions, and America’s fusion budget could never withstand that sort of strain. The story was little different overseas. No single nation could afford to build a tokamak that could achieve breakeven and sustained burn. Perhaps, though, by pooling their resources and joining together in one great effort, fusion scientists around the world could finally build a working fusion reactor.

The idea of an international reactor had been around since the budgets started dropping, but it truly came to life in 1985. At a summit in Geneva, Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reduce tensions between the U.S. and the USSR. Gorbachev suggested to Reagan the possibility of a joint effort to build a fusion reactor. Reagan jumped at the chance, as did France and Japan. Together, the four countries would build an enormous tokamak that would finally achieve ignition and sustained burn. For the first time, humans would be able to harness the power of the sun for peaceful purposes. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was born.

ITER was to be a monster. As design work began on it, scientists realized that it would cost $10 billion. The four parties, working together, could cough up the money, but ITER would devour the fusion budgets of all the participating countries.63 Even the big tokamaks—TFTR, JET, JT-60—would not survive. Once the ITER project was under way, there would be no room in the budget for anything else. This was a big problem.

Princeton scientists did not want their facility to disappear. Other fusion researchers, especially those who thought that non-tokamak machines were still worth exploring, were angry that the world was going to gamble all its fusion money on a tokamak while ignoring all other possibilities. Almost everyone agreed that a big international reactor effort would be a wonderful thing, but at the same time everyone wanted to have a thriving domestic fusion program, too. Fusion researchers wouldn’t get both, especially with the budgets dropping precipitously. In the early 1990s, with ITER in ascendance, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory seemed marked for death.

The first thing that would strike a visitor to the Princeton facility in the early 1990s would be the circles. There were circles everywhere. In the lobby, an office assistant swiveled about behind a large ring-shaped desk. A circular sofa surrounded a donut-shaped model of the TFTR. Other models of ringlike tokamaks were displayed in the waiting room. Even the auditorium was semicircular. And of course, the heart of the whole facility was the donut-shaped TFTR tokamak.

The second thing that would strike a visitor was the air of quiet desperation that hung about the lab. The staff was trying to sell fusion to the public, and while the TFTR was setting temperature records almost daily, nobody seemed to be buying. Budgets were still dropping, and the taxpayers didn’t protest. The lab, quietly, tried to change that attitude. Along each wall of the laboratory’s lobby, colorful posters exhorted the taxpayer to back fusion research. “Why Fusion?” read one. “Do We Really Need To Spend This Much On Energy Research?” asked another. Rush Holt, a physicist and the spokesman for the TFTR project, promised great things for TFTR—6 watts out for every 10 put in, within spitting distance of breakeven—but most of all, he conjured a future with fusion energy. Without it, he said, humanity would be in trouble.64

Where can we as a society get our energy? Fossil fuels pollute, cause global warming, and are running out. Renewable sources—solar, geothermal, wind—can’t provide nearly enough energy for an industrial society.65 That leaves nuclear energy: fusion or fission. Holt argued that fission is messy: a fission reactor uses up its fuel rods and leaves behind a radioactive mess that nobody