Nuclear Fusion: half a century of magnetic confinement research

Books by scientists about science usually fall into one of two distinct types: technical or popularizations. The technical category includes texts, collections, and monographs where, in physics at least, equations and data are the meat. In popular books, by contrast, it is said that each equation halves the readership: these books are written to be intelligible to the non-scientist. Nuclear Fusion: half a century of magnetic confinement fusion research falls into neither of these categories. Its authors, C M Braams and P E Stott, are physicists whose distinguished careers span most of the past half-century of fusion research. They write with both a first hand experience of the history of the field and an intimate knowledge of the science. The book might be described as a scientific history. Equations are unhesitatingly included where they are necessary to describe the physics, but the main thread of the book is the description of how fusion research evolved. Introductions to the physics of various topics are described briefly in `boxes' alongside the historical narrative. To a plasma physicist these are helpful and often insightful reminders of the fundamentals. I think that any professional physicist could benefit from these pithy technical summaries. But clearly they are not intended as more than pointers to a systematic understanding of plasma physics; and for a non-physicist they are doubtless incomprehensible. In giving a physicist's view of fusion history, the authors are careful to document their sources, with twenty seven pages of references. This scholarly approach greatly enhances the value of the work in describing the progress and achievements of fusion research. It also provides a much-needed reminder, to those who speak lightly about `innovation', of the tremendous breadth of ideas for plasma confinement that have already been studied. But it means that the book reads somewhat like a review article, and definitely not like earlier fusion popularizations. By comparison Robin Herman's Fusion: the search for endless energy (CUP 1990) stresses the human interest angle by using many quotes from interviews, and Ken Fowler's The fusion quest (Johns Hopkins 1997) is far more in the manner of personal recollections. While lacking these populist touches, Braams and Stott's book gives mature and balanced opinions about the reasons and influences, scientific and social, that have governed fusion's development. They outline the roots of nuclear energy and plasma physics leading to the classification of fusion research and its declassification in 1958 at Geneva. Continuing from the profusion of ideas disclosed at that time, they deal in succeeding chapters with open systems, pulsed toroidal configurations and other alternatives, stellarators, and tokamaks. Each configuration is traced from its earliest ideas to its modern embodiment-or its demise. In succeeding chapters are described the development of important techniques and scientific understanding, from the 1980s on, especially in application to the big tokamaks. The concluding chapter, which is remarkably up to date, discusses the steps to a fusion reactor and the history and status of ITER. As a student considering plasma fusion as a possible career, I recall reading the book by Artsimovich and it seeming the best available introduction to the scientific history of the field, although even then it was hopelessly out of date. Now, in this new work by Braams and Stott, I have a book to give to students today for a thoroughly modern introduction-not to the technical mastery of plasma physics, for which there are many introductory texts, but to the background of where fusion research has come from. This broader perspective is both fascinating and essential to our maturing discipline; so I warmly recommend this book to all readers of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. I H Hutchinson