Environmental Research Foundation . . P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403 . . Subscriptions are free. To subscribe, E-mail the words . . The Princeton group had produced a short, controlled burst of fusion energy inside a huge machine called a tokamak near the university campus in central New Jersey.
Fusion is the same reaction that makes the sun shine and makes an H-bomb so powerful.
Fusion buffs predict it will take another 40 years before they can build a commercial machine to generate electricity. It's a fair question. The idea of fusion energy was born when the first H-bomb exploded in the 1950s. Scientists realized that, if they could control all that energy, they could use it to boil water, turn a turbine, and generate electricity. Unfortunately, scientists in the 1950s underestimated how hard it would be to control a fusion reaction.