An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet.

In 1974, Frank Chen published the first edition of his Introduction to Plasma Physics and for four decades it reigned as the standard textbook of general plasma physics for upper-level undergraduate and first-year graduate students. The early 1970s had brought fusion energy research to the attention of the public and the federal government after a number of developments. One was the energy crisis, in which the U.S. faced weakening domestic oil production and difficulty in maintaining its supply from the Middle East. Another was the arrival of “new” fusion machine concepts, like the tokamak (which had been invented by Soviet physicists in the 1950s but went largely unnoticed until 1969) and inertial-confinement laser fusion (which, before 1972, had been classified due to its military applications). Excitement in the fusion and plasma physics community was high in the late 1970s. In 1984, the first volume of the second edition of Chen’s...