Power source of the future

Nice to see that this month's Prospect had an article on fusion power. I was peripherally involved in this in the early 90s, as my PhD was sort-of-relevant to fusion devices, and my supervisor still had some tenuous connections to the Culham lab. Therefore, off I went at the end of my first year to the Culham Plasma Physics Summer School. This had its plus points, such as wandering round Oxford in the evenings, drinking at the Turf Tavern, and staying in St Edmonds Hall. Basically though, the course was quite dull. We all had to be indoctrinated into thinking that fusion was the energy of the future. It did seem oddly half-hearted though, as if its all being 40 years off meant we didn't have to bother too much at the moment. And that, as the Prospect article rightly noted, is the point. Fusion power as a feasible generation option is always 40 years away, regardless of whether you are in 1970, 1992, or 2006. The principle is perfectly sound, but the devil is in actually engineering and building the thing. It's easy to demonstrate in broad terms how containment works, but as somebody during that summer school pointed out, in practice it's as easy as restraining a wet bar of soap with elastic bands.