Fusion Power Reading List

The challenge with reading about a topic like fusion is balancing the tradeoff between technical detail and readability. A book or article should give enough detail to provide some understanding of what’s actually going on, what progress has been made, what the challenges are, and so on. A high-level gloss with no technical detail doesn’t give you enough information to actually reason about, and is of little use other than entertainment. On the other hand, too much detail on a dense, technical topic like fusion quickly becomes unreadable for the non-expert.

A related challenge is that truly understanding something like fusion requires understanding the equations and mathematics — the actual physics involved — and for most readers (including me) this really isn’t feasible. The best that readers like me can hope for is to gain some kind of broad conceptual understanding, to get some sense of the broad “shape” of the topic without being misled or given a false sense of understanding. 

This makes for a difficult needle for a book or article to thread, but I found several that do an admirable job of it.

Recommended reading

Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy, by Robin Herman, 1990

This is a history of fusion power, from its beginnings in the 1940s and 50s up through then-current efforts in the late 1980s. Of all the books and sources I read, I found this one did the best job of describing the “arc” of fusion power. Herman gives a coherent, compelling portrait of fusion development: the people, the projects, the successes and failures, the ebbs and flows as researchers gradually discover the grim reality that fusion is an incredibly difficult scientific and engineering problem.

Herman isn’t a physicist (she was a journalist by training), but she clearly tried to do her homework, and the book is full of physicists and other experts describing the challenges of fusion in their own words. The main drawbacks of the book are that it ends in the late 1980s (and so misses almost 40 years of fusion development efforts), and that it was not quite technical enough for my tastes. It has little in the way of charts, graphs, or numbers, descriptions of how reactors work or the problems faced lean towards surface level, and so on. But it’s still the book I’d recommend to the general reader interested in the history of fusion and why it’s a hard problem.