Search for the Ultimate Energy Source: A History of the U.S. Fusion Energy Program, Stephen O.Dean, Springer, 2013. $129.00 (262 pp.). ISBN 978-1-4614-6036-7

A Piece of the Sun: The Quest for Fusion Energy, DanielClery, Overlook Duckworth, 2013. $27.95(320 pp.). ISBN ISBN 978-1-4683-0493-0

In A Piece of the Sun: The Quest for Fusion Energy, Daniel Clery tells us, “We owe everything to fusion.” He backs it up by stating that everything on Earth is made of stardust produced by fusion. Then he presents a comprehensive history of the quest for fusion energy that is both technological and insightful. Search for the Ultimate Energy Source: A History of the U.S. Fusion Energy Program is more focused: Author Stephen Dean gives us firsthand details of how the management of the US fusion program has evolved since the 1960s. Both authors tell us that worldwide development is at a dramatic stage; readers will conclude that fusion energy is not at hand and will wonder whether we will ever capture a piece of the Sun to sustain life.

Search for the Ultimate Energy Source provides original historical information and updates Joan Bromberg’s Fusion: Science, Politics, and the Invention of a New Energy Source (MIT Press, 1982). Dean, president of the nonprofit Fusion Power Associates and a former director of fusion magnetic confinement systems at the US Department of Energy, is well known in the fusion energy community for accurately portraying the technology’s development. Not surprisingly, his book is unmatched in its authoritative narrative of the people and events associated with the US program. Dean’s overall knowledge is extensive, and although he is clearly an advocate for fusion energy, the history he has recorded—and continues to record—will endure.

The first two chapters of Dean’s book provide a clear, succinct, and broadly accessible description of the fundamentals of fusion and current approaches for producing fusion energy. Throughout, Dean presents many inside stories of the US government’s inconsistencies on fusion energy policy. The reader will sense the fusion community’s budding hope in the 1960s; its triumph in the 1970s; the disappointments in the 1980s; hope, again, around 2000; and the fear of failure today.

Dean admirably captures the people and the spirit of the times and gives them historical context by citing notable accomplishments throughout the book. One example is the 1991 release of 1.7 MW of fusion power at the Joint European Torus in the first experiment to use tritium in a major machine. At the time, Dean prematurely stated that the event marked “the beginning of the transition from research to reality.”

In A Piece of the Sun, Clery, a science journalist, gives the history of fusion energy from an international perspective, with appropriate weight to early British and Soviet inventions. It starts with Peter Thonemann working out a reactor concept as an undergraduate student in Australia in 1939, attending Oxford University, and then moving with colleagues to “hangar 7” at the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, where they achieved ZETA, the zero-energy toroidal assembly concept of the 1950s.

The book then moves to Princeton University and Lyman Spitzer’s invention of the stellarator, a well-known story in the US. The tokamak, however, is the most successful magnetic bottle for fusion energy, and it was initiated in the Soviet Union. On that issue, Clery presents an interesting bit of history: He claims that Andrei Sakharov, who with Igor Tamm is widely credited for inventing the tokamak, insists that the country’s efforts started with the work of Oleg Lavrentyev while he was stationed with the Soviet army at Sakhalin Island in 1949.

Clery demonstrates good scientific taste in picking what to report and in adding details that give his story substance. An example is the way in which he describes how Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, destroyed the career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, at the same time he was promoting the fusion energy program. It was Strauss who drove the major 1958 Geneva conference, where the worldwide status of fusion energy was presented and actual devices were exhibited.

Both Dean and Clery update us on the National Ignition Facility, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and on ITER, the international fusion project based in Cadarache, France. Dean weaves the status of those endeavors into the picture of the evolving US fusion energy policy. Clery ably describes those two marvelous technological concepts that lead the controlled-fusion development efforts today.

The National Ignition Facility came to life in the 1990s, thanks to research accomplishments in laser-driven inertial confinement; Clery attributes the origination of that concept to work by John Nuckolls in the 1970s. Although the facility was driven by the need for an alternative to underground testing of nuclear warhead devices, US inertial-confinement researchers have always maintained “energy” as a motivation.

When it comes to the development of fusion energy these days, frustration abounds. An important section of Search for the Ultimate Energy Source illustrates that frustration with perspectives by 14 major players in the US. For example, Charles Baker asserts that “the mission should be to build a fusion demonstration plant in the USA by the year 2040,” and Robert Hirsch says that “tokamak fusion will almost certainly fail to become a viable, commercial electric power system.”

Dean expresses his own frustrations with the low levels of funding by the US government and the failure to develop enabling technologies for fusion energy. There’s at least a $10 billion shortfall between historical US spending on fusion energy and the levels, in 2014 dollars, advocated by Dean’s beloved 1976 plan for magnetic fusion confinement, which he developed as a director at the Energy Research and Development Administration (the predecessor of DOE). At the same time, the world has spent more than $100 billion to achieve self-sustained fusion burn at laboratory scale. And, except for materials, fusion-energy technology is not yet clearly defined. So some will not accept Dean’s reasons for the failure, thus far, of a clear path to fusion energy; rather, they’ll say that self-sustained fusion in the laboratory is just really difficult and needs a more complete science basis, as Clery’s book implies.

In comparing fusion to flight, Clery says, “Fusion is still at the wooden struts, wire and canvas stage of development.” In others words, fusion research is likely a long way from delivering a useful product. So when will fusion energy arrive? Clearly, we don’t know, but the story is not finished.

David H. Crandall is a retired physicist who has worked in and around fusion since the early 1970s, initially at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and then for 30 years at the US Department of Energy.