(The latest venture, a giant, multi-billion-dollar, international fusion project called ITER, is just now getting underway.) Again and again, they have failed, disgracing generations of scientists. For the past half-century, governments and research teams have tried to bottle the sun with lasers, magnets, sound waves, particle beams, and chunks of meta. Nuclear fusion was a virtually unlimited source of power that became the center of a tragic and comic quest that has left scores of scientists battered and disgraced. When weapons builders detonated the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, they tapped into the vastest source of energy in our solar system-the very same phenomenon that makes the sun shine. The author of Zero looks at the messy history of the struggle to harness fusion energy.
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