Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to thank the International Atomic Energy Agency for asking me to give this lecture. It is my great honour to be here and to speak to you who share a strong interest and enthusiasm for developing plasma physics and technology with the common goal of attaining thermonuclear energy for the welfare of mankind. I think that fusion energy is essentially different, in many respects, from traditional energy sources.
Fusion is really a very difficult technology, to capture the 'sun' within a man-made cage.
In this lecture, allow me to consider only magnetic confinement fusion. Even in common internal combustion engines, physical and chemical processes taking place within combustion cylinders are also extremely complicated and rapidly changing in time, and we are far from understanding the detailed mechanism of combustion. Consequently the control of chemical products in exhaust gases, for example, is still not easy. However, the phenomena and the relevant materials are now within our reach and can be investigated experimentally well enough to obtain the data necessary for the design of practical engines. Now, when we recollect the history of fusion research and development, we first imagined a high temperature plasma to be like a gaseous octopus or jellyfish that has no bones or shell and is difficult to catch, especially when it becomes violent at high temperatures.