The return of nuclear fusion?

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This Prospect Magazine article is by Fred Pearce, an acquaintance of mine in years past from Cambridge who I have always found to be one of the more thoughtful and smart writers on complicated technological issues and their environmental and social impact, but from whom I have not heard much in a few years. As it turns out, he has a forthcoming book, The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change. Here he considers whether the dream of fusion power is worth pursuing.

“They call themselves ‘fusion gypsies’—scientists who have travelled the world, moving from one nuclear reactor to the next, living the dream that some day, somewhere, they can re-create the reactions that take place in the heart of the stars to generate huge amounts of cheap, clean electricity for the world.

Their goal is nuclear power, but not as we know it. This is fusion and not fission. Fission involves mining, processing and irradiating vast amounts of uranium, and leaving behind an even larger legacy of radioactive waste with half-lives stretching into the next ice age. Whereas, say the fusion gypsies, a small vanload of fuel supplied to a fusion power station could supply the electricity needs of a city of 1m people for a year, and leave behind only paltry amounts of radioactive waste that will decay to nothing within a century.”