Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for RADIOI, and today I will
Speaker 1: be reading National Geographic magazine dated November twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the first article
Speaker 1: titled Inside the Colossal Quest for limitless Energy by Michael Finkel.
Speaker 1: Around the world, the race is on to harness the
Speaker 1: near infinite power of nuclear fusion. In a small town
Speaker 1: in the south of France, a scientific mega project of
Speaker 1: extraordinary dimension is an inching closer to solving our global
Speaker 1: energy needs forever by building a star on Earth. Real stars.
Speaker 1: The ones in space are simple beats. Our Sun formed
Speaker 1: some four point six billion years ago from a cloud
Speaker 1: consisting of essentially one ingredient, hydrogen, the most basic an
Speaker 1: abundant element in the universe. Gravity kneaded the cloud into
Speaker 1: a big, rotating ball and kept squeezing from there, density
Speaker 1: and warmth spiking until its core reached about twenty seven
Speaker 1: million degrees fahrenheit. Hydrogen crumbles when collisions occur at this
Speaker 1: temperature and pressure, creating the soupy jumble of atomic parts
Speaker 1: known as plasma, the fourth state of matter after solid
Speaker 1: liquid and gas. Though rare on Earth outside of lightning
Speaker 1: bolts and neon signs, plasma accounts for over ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent of the Solar System's mass, most of it stored
Speaker 1: highly agitated in the Sun throughout the Sun's soup trillions
Speaker 1: of times every instant, four hydrogen atoms locked together in
Speaker 1: a series of steps to make helium with a much
Speaker 1: higher fusion point. Helium bobs placidly amid the solar havoc,
Speaker 1: a sturdy lifeboat, not even breaking a sweat at twenty
Speaker 1: seven mills degrees, and there's enough hydrogen in the Sun
Speaker 1: to keep forging helium for another five billion years. One
Speaker 1: further process takes place in each of these nuclear fusion reactions.
Speaker 1: A helium atom is just a speck lighter than four
Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms, and the leftover bits of matter, unleashed and
Speaker 1: energetic thrash through the plasma, shimmy gradually to the Sun's
Speaker 1: surface and stream into space. Those headed in the right
Speaker 1: direction deliver morsels of heat and light to Earth. Here's
Speaker 1: how mighty our Sun is. The total energy it produces
Speaker 1: every second would power the entire Earth gluttonously for hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of years, and the process by which a
Speaker 1: star does this seems tantalizingly easy. What if we could
Speaker 1: create a smaller sun here on Earth and tap into
Speaker 1: its power, Then theoretically we'd have a virtually unlimited source
Speaker 1: of clean and cheap energy, emitting no carbon dioxide, potentially
Speaker 1: halting global warming and environmental collapse. World would literally be saved.
Speaker 1: It sounds improbable, but such an endeavor has long been
Speaker 1: under way at a vast construction site in the south
Speaker 1: of France, where both the heart science and the need
Speaker 1: for human collaboration are precedented, unprecedented and unpredictable, and the
Speaker 1: dream of a better future can be witnessed coming to life.
Speaker 1: The artificial star is called etair Iter pronounced Eeter, the
Speaker 1: Latin word for the whey and an acronym for the
Speaker 1: International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The one hundred acre work area
Speaker 1: Handcake Flat is an hour's drive inland from the Mediterranean Sea,
Speaker 1: tucked amid pine forests and vineyards with craggy hills on
Speaker 1: the horizon. Each weekday, more than two thousand people physicists
Speaker 1: to welders arrive at the site, smaller crews toil at night.
Speaker 1: Thirty three nations, represented half the world's population, are official
Speaker 1: Eater members, and workers from ninety countries have been involved
Speaker 1: in its creation. A web of cultures knitting a singular
Speaker 1: machine in the middle of the job site, dominating the view.
Speaker 1: A windowless cement edifice rises like a volcano. To enter
Speaker 1: this structure, you must visit the attached dressing room and
Speaker 1: swap your footwear for white clean room shoes. Then use
Speaker 1: the electric shoes scrubber to ensure that any dirt or
Speaker 1: contaminants are gone, and march in place on a sticky
Speaker 1: bat to eliminate gunk on the soles. The machine being
Speaker 1: built needs to be kept fastidiously pristine. A dropped pen
Speaker 1: cap or stray fingerprint could cause damage. You also have
Speaker 1: to wear a white lab coat, a hair nut, a
Speaker 1: hard hat, protective eyewear, and white gloves. Once properly dressed,
Speaker 1: you pass through a plastic strip curtain and unzip a
Speaker 1: canvas flap like a tent door and zip it shut
Speaker 1: behind you. Then walk down a narrow corridor fluorescently lit.
Speaker 1: The walls, floor, and ceiling all the same bright white
Speaker 1: as your shoes. The air is still and stifling. At
Speaker 1: the end of the hallway, unzip and re zip another door,
Speaker 1: Navigate a second white corridor, Climb up a layer of
Speaker 1: scaffolding jungle gym style, and duck through one more zippered portal.
Speaker 1: There is a claustrophobic sense of being lost in a labyrinth.
Speaker 1: Traverse yet another dizzying white hallway, and open a further door,
Speaker 1: and there you are inside the Great Machine Room. It's
Speaker 1: an industrial ecosystem of ducks and pipes and metal slabs
Speaker 1: on some wild scale that skews your bearings. Only when
Speaker 1: you spot the white clad workers tethered to scaffolding amid
Speaker 1: the overwhelming gadgetry ants on a hill does the enormity emerge.
Speaker 1: The contraption fills a space the equivalent of a twenty
Speaker 1: story building. It will eventually contain ten million parts, hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of them, uniquely fabricated, and along with its housing,
Speaker 1: weigh nearly four hundred fifty thousand tons. Eater is likely
Speaker 1: the most complex machine humans have ever attempted build. A
Speaker 1: lot of the metal is burnished to a brilliant shine,
Speaker 1: many pieces plated in silver, an ideal material for deflecting
Speaker 1: heat from sensitive components. Pipes run here and there in
Speaker 1: parallel rows, like raked sand in zen gardens, winding through
Speaker 1: the works. The heart of the machine is in the
Speaker 1: form of a giant's sphere with a doughnut shaped hollow
Speaker 1: where plasma may one day whirl. The device is called
Speaker 1: a tokamak. There are few sharp edges on a tokamak,
Speaker 1: and massive segments of Eater's machinery are sculpted with graceful
Speaker 1: sandstone like curves. Eater is publicly funded billions of dollars
Speaker 1: shouldered by dozens of governments, with no profit motive or
Speaker 1: military aim. We are contributing to world peace, says Kijung Jung,
Speaker 1: head of the project's South Korean unit, expressing an admirable
Speaker 1: objective that is somewhat belied by decorated decades of international disputes.
Speaker 1: The project is open source. If Eeter operates as planned,
Speaker 1: any nation or private company can access its intellectual property
Speaker 1: free of charge. This is not going to happen soon.
Speaker 1: The quest for a mechanical star has been unfolding for
Speaker 1: a century and still has years to go. But in
Speaker 1: a world that can feel quick, tempered and fractious, Eater
Speaker 1: appears to be a crazily ambitious, long term project rooted
Speaker 1: in optimism and a desire for unity. The endeavor has
Speaker 1: already extended across careers and lifetimes, with each step forward
Speaker 1: seemingly offset by unanticipated setbacks. It will be a savior
Speaker 1: for future generations, promises Dutch physicist Acco Mas, a twenty
Speaker 1: five year veteran of Eater, speaking from his office overlooking
Speaker 1: the teeming constructive area. A few scientists have observed that
Speaker 1: Eter may be our era's version of the Egyptian Pyramids
Speaker 1: or the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Some visitors permitted to
Speaker 1: see the machine have been moved to tears, for it
Speaker 1: can seem a miracle that Eater exists at all. Other observers,
Speaker 1: including some of the most powerful voices in science, have
Speaker 1: not been swayed by Eater's charms. Three separate Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: winners in physics, Pierre Jill de Gene of France, his
Speaker 1: countrymen George Sharpak, and Masatoshi Koshiba of Japan, independently declared
Speaker 1: that attempts to create a miniature sun to help Earth
Speaker 1: help power the Earth are a waste of money and effort,
Speaker 1: doomed to fizzle out and possibly dangerous. Despite such criticism,
Speaker 1: in eature like facility, if completed and hooked to an
Speaker 1: energy grid, would presumably be safer, cleaner, and more productive
Speaker 1: than any nuclear power plant now in use. All of
Speaker 1: the world's four hundred plus nuclear reactors operating across some
Speaker 1: thirty nations rely on fission. Fusion and fission are similar
Speaker 1: looking words, based on the same concept of creating energy
Speaker 1: from excess matter in in atomic reactions, but otherwise they
Speaker 1: are opposites. In a fusion plant, lightweight atoms hydrogen has
Speaker 1: just one electron one proton and zero one or two neutrons,
Speaker 1: are forced together with fission. Heavier elements such as uranium
Speaker 1: or plutonium, each with a total of more than three
Speaker 1: hundred electrons. Protons and neutrons are split apart. The great
Speaker 1: advantage of fission is that reactions are easy to start
Speaker 1: when good jolt and particles drop from the big atoms
Speaker 1: like fruit from a tree. But fission is messy. Some
Speaker 1: of the radioactive waste will be toxic to humans for
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of years. Fusion two produces hazardous radioactive
Speaker 1: byproducts but nothing remotely comparable. Also, fissile material like uranium
Speaker 1: may be depleted within a century, while the type of
Speaker 1: hydrogen best suited for fusion is almost endlessly abundant in
Speaker 1: sea water. There is also fission's limited but unavoidable record
Speaker 1: of catastrophe three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in nineteen seventy nine, Chernobyl, Ukraine,
Speaker 1: then part of the USSR in nineteen eighty six, Fukushima,
Speaker 1: Japan in twenty eleven. Fission reactions without careful control can
Speaker 1: become explosive, prone to gallop off uncontrollably. With fusion, runaway
Speaker 1: reactions and meltdowns aren't possible in a fusion plant, Any
Speaker 1: accident or system failure, or even a small instability in
Speaker 1: the plasma immediately causes the reaction to lose strength and
Speaker 1: extinguish itself. Also, fusion produces four times as much energy
Speaker 1: as fission with the same quantity of fuel, and fusion
Speaker 1: is about four million times more energetic and vastly cleaner
Speaker 1: than chemical reactions that burn oil or coal. Renewable energy sources,
Speaker 1: including solar, wind, and geothermal, are, like nuclear power, largely
Speaker 1: carbon free, but none of them appear capable of scaling
Speaker 1: up to meet global demand. Fusion fills the bill of
Speaker 1: energy savior, except that it's difficult to begin the reaction
Speaker 1: and harder to maintain it. Atoms naturally repel one another,
Speaker 1: and enormous forces are required to slam them together and
Speaker 1: fuse them. Even then, plasma is skittish and fragile, constantly
Speaker 1: seeking to dissipate. The largest detonation of all time, the
Speaker 1: Big Bang, con maintained fusion for only three minutes before
Speaker 1: it faded away. For the next hundred million years, Fusion
Speaker 1: didn't exist in the universe until gravity muscled enough hydrogen
Speaker 1: together for the first stars to ignite. Virtually every Layov
Speaker 1: experiment involving fusion has consumed more energy than it has produced,
Speaker 1: Contrary to the goal of a power plant. Fusion energy
Speaker 1: currently sits at the maddening intersection of conceptual simplicity and
Speaker 1: technological perplexity. Perplexity some fusion experts have concluded across several
Speaker 1: decades now that controlling fusion is beyond the limits of
Speaker 1: human in capability. Daniels Jasby, who worked at the Princeton
Speaker 1: Plasma Physics LAP for twenty five years, wrote after his
Speaker 1: retirement that a fusion plant would be too convoluted, requiring
Speaker 1: endless maintenance, and cause more problems than it would solve.
Speaker 1: The late Lawrence Lidsky, an associate director of m i
Speaker 1: t's Fusion Center and founding editor of the Journal of
Speaker 1: Fusion Energy, declared after a long career that fusion power
Speaker 1: is a fantasy, noting that it's widely regarded as the
Speaker 1: hardest scientific and technical problem ever tackled. Walter Marshall, former
Speaker 1: chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, reportedly said
Speaker 1: that fusion is an idea with infinite possibility and zero
Speaker 1: chance of success. There's no shortage of scientists to support Eater.
Speaker 1: Stephen Hawking once said that fusion was the single idea
Speaker 1: with the greatest potential to advance humanity, but the project's
Speaker 1: detractors mostly articulate the same idea. Eater's complexity can seem absurd.
Speaker 1: The more you know about the machine, the less it
Speaker 1: may appear to make sense. This is high risk, high reward,
Speaker 1: says Catherine McCarthy, director of the United States Eater Bureau.
Speaker 1: The idea is undeniably a long shot, possibly a wild
Speaker 1: goose chase that might in fact exceed human capacity. But
Speaker 1: for many who've dedicated their working lives to Eater, it's
Speaker 1: precisely this uncertainty and absurdity that make the effort alluring.
Speaker 1: How can we know our limits unless we try our
Speaker 1: hardest to exceed them. A chief absurdity is the heat.
Speaker 1: Of the three fusion requirements plasma, confinement, pressure, and heat.
Speaker 1: Humans are most limited by pressure. A million earths could
Speaker 1: fit inside the Sun, and this size difference is insurmountable.
Speaker 1: The center of the sun is thirteen times denser than lead.
Speaker 1: There's no known way we can create a squeeze like
Speaker 1: that on our planet. To make up for this, a
Speaker 1: lot of heat is the main source of Eater's heat
Speaker 1: comes from a pair of giant laser like particle guns
Speaker 1: called neutral beam injectors. Each gun is the size of
Speaker 1: two city buses part and to end their barrels point
Speaker 1: into the tokamak, they will fire one million bold particle
Speaker 1: beams continuously for an hour. To power the guns and
Speaker 1: other components, Eater has built a ten acre electrical switch
Speaker 1: guard capable of drawing as much energy from the French
Speaker 1: national grid as a city of one million people. Though
Speaker 1: the machine, whence operational, should prove that this debt can
Speaker 1: be repaid at least tenfold. When the guns open fire,
Speaker 1: hydrogen gas in the tucamac will swirl through the doughnut,
Speaker 1: increasing in velocity as the temperature rises one million degrees
Speaker 1: fahrenheit two million, ten million. The atoms will move faster
Speaker 1: than the speed of sound, then swifter still. As the
Speaker 1: heat exceeds the twenty seven million degrees at the center
Speaker 1: of the sun. That passes fifty million, one hundred million,
Speaker 1: two hundred million, the force of accelerating particles in the
Speaker 1: toucamac will equal that of two space shuttles launching at once.
Speaker 1: Only at two hundred seventy million degrees ten times the
Speaker 1: temperature of the Sun's core will hydrogen atoms in eater
Speaker 1: collide in shed electrons, then fuse together as helium. How
Speaker 1: do you contain something so hot? No known material could
Speaker 1: do it. A toucamac made of pure diamonds would vaporize instantly,
Speaker 1: But here the nature of plasma is healthful. The stew
Speaker 1: of atomic parts includes a large number of positively charged
Speaker 1: protons and negatively charged electrons. Since these particles are affected
Speaker 1: by magnetic forces, the jar confining eater's plasma will be
Speaker 1: formed of electromagnetic fields. Like many ideas being implemented at Eater,
Speaker 1: the development of the electromagnetic system draws on the most
Speaker 1: promising discoveries from years of research laboratories worldwide that have
Speaker 1: nothing to do with nuclear fusion. The magnets at Eater
Speaker 1: also absurd. Start with the central solenoid, which will fill
Speaker 1: the whole of the donut. It's like a grain silo
Speaker 1: six stories high and will become the backbone of the
Speaker 1: world's most powerful magnetic system, generating forces that could lift
Speaker 1: an aircraft carrier out of the water. Circling the machine
Speaker 1: like hula hoops, will be six immense poloidal magnets, and
Speaker 1: hanging vertically will be eighteen D shaped pteroidal magnets, each
Speaker 1: over fifty feet tall, enclosing the plasma's loop. Together, the
Speaker 1: magnets will weigh more than eleven thousand tons, and they
Speaker 1: will be machined with extraordinary fiship precision, the margin for
Speaker 1: air less than the thickness of a sheet of paper.
Speaker 1: To create this, says one Eater worker, you have to
Speaker 1: be a little crazy. These are all superconducting magnets, which
Speaker 1: means that they can carry strong electrical currents without resistance,
Speaker 1: allowing the intent fields required to corral Eater's plasma. For
Speaker 1: superconductivity to work, these magnets must be kept extremely cold.
Speaker 1: Eater has also built a cryo plant big enough to
Speaker 1: house a soccer field, the most complicated refrigerator in the world,
Speaker 1: as an Eater cryogenic engineer put it, that will circulate
Speaker 1: liquid helium through the magnets. Eater's magnets need to be
Speaker 1: cooled to negative fourgnd fifty degrees fahrenheit. This is just
Speaker 1: a few ticks above absolute zero, the point at which
Speaker 1: atomic energy has reached its minimum nearly motionless state. Perhaps
Speaker 1: the ultimate absurdity of Eater is that it will contain
Speaker 1: one of the hottest known places in the universe and
Speaker 1: one of the coldest, little more than a body's length apart.
Speaker 1: We are playing with Mother Nature's forces, says Alberto Luarte,
Speaker 1: director of Eater's science division, jotting down a page of
Speaker 1: mathematical calculations showing just how great these forces are. I
Speaker 1: can't predict the difficulties we will face. We may learn
Speaker 1: that we understand nothing. Here's how it's supposed to work.
Speaker 1: The doughnut shaped area in the Tucamac will be pumped clear,
Speaker 1: forming a vacuum. Any stray molecules can pollute the plasma.
Speaker 1: The magnets will be super cold and activated. Then hydrogen
Speaker 1: gas will be injected into the vacuum chamber at about
Speaker 1: half a gram per second. This gas will be heavier
Speaker 1: than common hydrogen. Eater's recipe calls for a combination of deutium,
Speaker 1: which adds one neutron to the normally neutronless atom, and tritium,
Speaker 1: which adds two. Without these isotopes, the tucamac would have
Speaker 1: to be heated hundreds of millions of degrees higher. Yet
Speaker 1: this efficiency also brings complications. Deutyium, though rear, can be
Speaker 1: plecked out of sea water our oceans contain a many
Speaker 1: million year global supply, but tritium doesn't naturally occur and
Speaker 1: is slightly radioactive. So Eater will also be testing first
Speaker 1: of a kind components that its hopes will permit machine
Speaker 1: to safely breed its own tritium. Once the neutral beam
Speaker 1: injectors have zapped the gas to the necessary two hundred
Speaker 1: seven million, two hundred seventy million degrees, the resulting plasma
Speaker 1: will glow faintly red like an aurora. The northern and
Speaker 1: southern lights are also plasmas, and says an eater physicist,
Speaker 1: emit a sound like the screech of an alley cat.
Speaker 1: Newly fused helium atoms will drop out of the plasma
Speaker 1: a sort of ash and collect in a huge dish
Speaker 1: known as the diverter at the bottom of the toocomac.
Speaker 1: Heavy hydrogen will continually be added, keeping the plasma fed.
Speaker 1: Another benefit of using neuterium and trite tritium is that
Speaker 1: about half of the fusion reactions by products are neutrons.
Speaker 1: Neutrons well named are neutral, unaffected by magnetism. Loose neutrons
Speaker 1: will fly through the plasma in all directions and crash
Speaker 1: against the walls of the toocomac struke, picking what's called
Speaker 1: the blanket. Eater's blanket not soft, as formed from hunks
Speaker 1: of tungsten, steel, aluminium, and bronze designed to absorb this
Speaker 1: hailstorm of neutrons hundreds of trillions per second and transfer
Speaker 1: the heat of the particle's kinetic energy from inside the
Speaker 1: tochomac to outside. In an actual fusion power plant, this
Speaker 1: heat could be used to boil water, creating steam which
Speaker 1: can spin turbines and generate electricity. The strange truth of Eater, however,
Speaker 1: is that it will never produce power. The machine is
Speaker 1: strictly an experiment to prove that all the steps are achievable.
Speaker 1: Steam turbines, old technology well understood, will presumably be installed
Speaker 1: in later generations of fusion plants that will be built
Speaker 1: all over the world. This step could easily be more
Speaker 1: than fifty years away. The time scale is not compatible
Speaker 1: with our immediacy culture, says former Eater chief scientist Tim Lose,
Speaker 1: but he implies this fusion energy may still arrive in
Speaker 1: time to save us. All. Though Eater won't have energy
Speaker 1: producing equipment, it will be outfitted with a wide array
Speaker 1: of diagnostic tools to judge the effectiveness of every test run,
Speaker 1: and while future plants may have to run almost continuously,
Speaker 1: the stated goal of Eater is to maintain a burning,
Speaker 1: energy rich plasma for four hundred seconds or a bit
Speaker 1: less than seven minutes. More than a hundred years of
Speaker 1: effort and money have already been devoted to achieving these minutes.
Speaker 1: Painted across the lobby of the five story Eater headquarters building,
Speaker 1: home to administrative offices and scientific think tanks, is a
Speaker 1: timeline of fusion milestones. It begins in nineteen nineteen, when
Speaker 1: French physicist Jean Perien hypothesized that stars produced energy through fusion.
Speaker 1: This was definitely proved in the nineteen thirties, and soon
Speaker 1: after the power of fusion was grasped, scientists set about
Speaker 1: trying to kill people with it. The bombs drop on
Speaker 1: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August nineteen forty five only used fission.
Speaker 1: After World War II, the global arms race escalated, and
Speaker 1: the US initiated a project to weaponize fusion. On November one,
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two, the first hydrogen bob IV MIKE, a
Speaker 1: two stage explosive using fission and fusion, completely eliminated one
Speaker 1: of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, a blast equal
Speaker 1: to seven hundred Hiroshimas. This was just the start. A
Speaker 1: scientist swiftly realized that fission fusion hybrid bombs could be
Speaker 1: boosted exponentially. The threat of destroying the planet with a
Speaker 1: single weapon was real. Global powers attempted to change that trajectory.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty three, US President Dwight Eisenhower delivered what
Speaker 1: is known as the Atoms for Peace Address at the
Speaker 1: United Nations in New York City, in which he called
Speaker 1: on the entire body of the world scientists and engineers
Speaker 1: to abandon the military use of atomic reactions and instead
Speaker 1: adapt their studies to the arts of peace. Most scientists
Speaker 1: focused on fission, but a handful of researchers, regarded by
Speaker 1: some mainstream academics at the time as mavericks or dreamers
Speaker 1: or con artists, realized that fusion was the ultimate world
Speaker 1: change in prize and set about trying to utilize it.
Speaker 1: The first generation of fusion machines, incorporating mirrors or lasers
Speaker 1: or electric currents, all ended in miserable failure. Some simply
Speaker 1: didn't work or were exposed as frauds, while others formed
Speaker 1: plasma that lasted a fraction of a second before collapsing.
Speaker 1: Plasma physicists learned was a fiendish subject substance containing it
Speaker 1: has been compared to wrapping jelly and rubber bands. Volatilities
Speaker 1: in plasma events that snuff the reaction were given descriptive
Speaker 1: names kink, instability, sausage instability, bump entail. The list totals
Speaker 1: more than fifty by the time of the second United
Speaker 1: Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of atomic energy.
Speaker 1: Held in Geneva, Switzerland, in nineteen fifty eight, world leaders
Speaker 1: generally agreed that all nations nuclear energy research should be
Speaker 1: declassified and shared. Soviet Union concurring disclosed a breakthrough that
Speaker 1: was later given the name tokemac, shortening of the Russian
Speaker 1: phrase to roidal chamber with magnetic coil. The tokmac was
Speaker 1: an elegant design that could achieve hotter plasmas and longer
Speaker 1: confinement times than anything before. No fusion device had ever
Speaker 1: been more promising, and scientists calculated that bigger tokemacs would
Speaker 1: provide the volume needed to maintain plasma in a stamp
Speaker 1: stable and energetic state. By the late nineteen seventies, three
Speaker 1: separate giant tokomacs were in development in Princeton, New Jersey, Oxfordshire, England,
Speaker 1: and Naka, Japan. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent
Speaker 1: on each one an optimism search, but years passed in
Speaker 1: which none of these new machines came close to proving
Speaker 1: that fusion was economically feasible. Fusion observers like to say
Speaker 1: is twenty years away and always will be. At a
Speaker 1: juncture when fusion could have easily been abandoned, it was
Speaker 1: unexpectedly revived. In nineteen eighty five. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
Speaker 1: and U S President Ronald Reagan held a summit in Geneva,
Speaker 1: their first ever meeting. The agreement they reached included a
Speaker 1: declaration that the two nations and any other countries willing
Speaker 1: to join them would work together to build a fusion
Speaker 1: reactor for the benefit of all mankind, and thus from
Speaker 1: the end game of the Cold War was born Eater.
Speaker 1: Bickering and infighting commenced immediately. Eater is in human in scope, hot, cold, immense,
Speaker 1: sub atomic, yet can also seem like the most human
Speaker 1: thing ever bloated by geopolitics, red tape and hubris. Two
Speaker 1: dozen European countries in Japan promptly joined the alliance, and
Speaker 1: with no nation holding majority control, haggling began over Eater's
Speaker 1: technical design and cost. The squabbling dragged on for years
Speaker 1: through the break up of the Soviet Union in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one. Russia remained with Eater and bureaucratically onward into
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight, when the US, having spent three hundred
Speaker 1: forty five million dollars on what some officials felt was
Speaker 1: basically nothing quit the project. The remaining members soldiered on
Speaker 1: and finished the design specs. Ter's machine will have five
Speaker 1: times the volume of the next largest tokamak. Around the
Speaker 1: time that the US government, urged by American academics, rejoined
Speaker 1: the program in two thousand three. That same year, China
Speaker 1: and South Korea also signed up, followed soon after by India.
Speaker 1: EETER had become the United Nations of Science, a home
Speaker 1: for the best and brightest from all over the world,
Speaker 1: as One Eater executive Rosalie described it. In reality, though,
Speaker 1: a disparate medley of cultures with rudderless governance meant that
Speaker 1: the project was behind schedule and over budget. As a
Speaker 1: matter of course, the battle over where to build the
Speaker 1: machine consumed more years of politicking, ultimately coming down to
Speaker 1: France or Japan. A compromise was reached and it was
Speaker 1: decided that there would be a Japanese director General and
Speaker 1: a French work site. Ground was broken in January two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, a mere twenty one years after the Gorbachev
Speaker 1: and Reagan accord in Geneva. Seven more years of preparatory
Speaker 1: work ensued, clearing and leveling the site, then creating an
Speaker 1: elaborate foundation fitted with shock absorbers to protect the machine
Speaker 1: from potential earthquakes. Just over a decade ago, in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: construction finally began on the monumental Tokomac housing, the centerpiece
Speaker 1: of the thirty nine buildings and technical areas sprawled across
Speaker 1: E Terras campus. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine.
Speaker 1: For today, E reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: Keep on listening and have a great day.