As a child of the 80s and 90s, the movie The Saint came out while I was in graduate school, and I had a good giggle at Elisabeth Shue storing the equations for cold fusion in her bra on index cards. There was so much unreal about this (so much), and yet, the idea of cold fusion and the presence of a poetry-spouting Val Kilmer kept my college-age self watching. The stuff of 1990s movies, fusion – cold or hot, take your pick – has been this potential breakthrough, off to the side being worked on, that many have kept hoping would somehow solve the energy crisis.

Nuclear power as we know it relies on fission: the breaking apart of atoms like uranium-235 which can break down into krypton and barium as well as neutrons, light, and energy. Nuclear reactors, when run safely, don’t pollute our environment, but they do create radioactive byproducts that have to be stored and this is problematic.

Fusion, however, works through the combining of safe, lightweight elements, like hydrogen, which release energy when fused into heavy atoms. Objects like our own Sun effectively fuse hydrogen in the high-temperature, high-pressure environment in their cores. Here on Earth, things are less effective, and fusion reactions that produce more energy than they require to maintain just haven’t been produced, yet.

People still keep hoping that fusion and its promise of clean energy are something that will come. In a new review paper in the European Physical Journal, sixty years of data is reviewed to try and understand what factors are at play with plasma-related fusion. Corresponding author Pavel Goncharov explains: Plasma is the dominant state of the visible matter in the present Universe and nuclear fusion powers the stars. The ability to burn deuterium formed at the beginning of the Universe and generate energy represents a new height for mankind.

And with extreme pressure and extreme heat, both of which require extreme energy input, deuterium can be fused. The key is going to be finding a way to fuse things with less energy in and more energy out. Current research is pursuing the possibility of using magnetic fields to confine and compress the plasma. It also builds on the 1951 work by Andrei Sakharov who realized that fast-moving hydrogen ions could collide with slow neutral particles and transfer their charge prior to escaping magnetic confinement. By looking for these fast-moving, neutral escapees, researchers can better understand the ion distributions within the magnetic field and slowly work toward understanding fusion as a power source.

This paper’s authors explain: Three factors played a role in our interest in fusion science. First, it involves multiple branches of fundamental science. Second, this field is of great practical importance. Third, a new clean and abundant energy source is the basis for a better future for mankind. This is an impressive combination.

It’s just a combination that we don’t yet have a clear recipe for combining, and sadly, there is no scientist like Elizabeth Shue’s “Dr. Emma Russel”, who has the answer hidden in their shirt.

More Information

Springer Publishing press release

“60 Years of neutral particle analysis: from early tokamaks to ITER,” M. P. Petrov et al., 2021 March 19, The European Physical Journal H