I'm just finishing up
Sun in a Bottle by Charles Seife. He covers the pursuit of fusion power from the early awareness of radioactivity, through the construction of fission bombs, onward to fusion research (magnetic confinement, inertial -- laser -- confinement) and fringe science, such as cold fusion, sonoluminescence and electrostatic confinement (fusors).
[Update One: The above paragraph sounds pretty pejorative, and it is. Seife takes pains to describe how easy it is to mistake the signs of fusion, and how easy it is to become emotionally invested in the results of these smaller experiments. But he is pretty clear that the evidence is not there. I'm not going to become a champion for either side. I just read a book, people.]It's a fascinating book, and coincidentally, I've been sitting on a video that was made a couple of years ago at Google featuring
Robert Bussard. The video is called
Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really). During the talk, Bussard presents his work on electrostatic confinement, and it's a wonderful talk, even if I don't really follow the physics that well. Sadly, Charles Seife mentions this in his book, and puts it in the same category as cold fusion and bubble fusion. I hope he's wrong. Bussard was a fascinating scientist and it would be great if he figured out a path to fusion power before he died.
[Update Two: I'm going to quote the entire paragraph on Bussard, so that M. Simon (another commentor) can judge the tone for himself:
On November 9, 2006, just days before the Olson story broke, the fusion physicist Robert Bussard gave a talk at Google about his research with a modified fusor. He had been working for the navy, but after a number of years he had run out of money for the program. The scientist told his audience that if he could only get his hands on $200 million, he would be able to produce a working power plant within four to five years. Bussard was deceiving himself if mainstream scientific thought is any guide. The equations of plasma physics strongly imply that fusorlike devices are very unlikely to produce more energy than they consume. Nature's inexorable energy-draining powers are too hard to overcome.
