Word: reactor
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...three times hotter than the core of the sun -- causing the mixture to ignite suddenly in a nuclear- fusion reaction, the same kind that takes place inside stars and hydrogen bombs. More than 3 million watts of energy began pouring from the superheated gas inside the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, and for the four seconds or so that the experiment lasted, the hottest spot in the solar system by a sizable margin was in Plainsboro, New Jersey...
...tears. Some of them had worked on the project for more than 20 years, and the success of the experiment last week proved that the time had not been wasted. Not only had the researchers trounced the 1.7 million-watt record set by a similar European reactor early last year, they had also taken a major step toward exploiting a safe, clean source of power that uses fuels extracted from ordinary water...
That doesn't mean, however, that anyone should rush to invest in fusion futures. Impressive as Tokamak's achievement was, the $1.6 billion machine generated only one-eighth as much power as it consumed. The next day the reactor managed to generate more than 5 million watts. But even its eventual goal of 10 million will still be only half of the incoming energy. The experiment is an important milestone, but fusion power is still a long way from being commercially useful...
Confining a gas made of electrically charged atomic nuclei -- a plasma -- has proved to be far more complex than anyone had suspected, and so has heating it. While the first rudimentary fusion reactors were a few feet across and weighed a ton or two, the Tokamak weighs hundreds of tons and fills a gymnasium-size room. A commercial reactor would be much bigger still and with current technology would cost hundreds of billions of dollars...
...knows for sure whether fusion on a large scale will be practical. The U.S. Department of Energy has canceled a bigger machine that was supposed to go beyond what Tokamak can achieve. Instead America will join the Europeans, Japanese and Russians in building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; when it goes into operation a decade or so from now, fusion scientists should finally have a device that generates more power than it consumes. Even then it will take decades of engineering before any households could possibly draw electricity from a commercial fusion plant...