Just Like "The Core"

...only better, and real. I hated that movie from beginning to end; when I confronted the friend who (I thought) had said it wasn't bad, he claimed that he'd never seen it. It was a waste of a rental, a waste of time, a waste of petroleum resources in the plastic of the DVD.

Over the past few weeks there have been several articles in my feed on the idea of fusion power, ranging from "we should just give up," to news that the EU may spend 5 billion Euros on a very large, tokomak-style reactor, to news that the National Ignition Facilty (NIF), at Livermore Labs (California) will be winding up its construction phase this spring. I found all of these articles very interesting, and recommend all three if fusion power is a topic that interests you. If you only have time for one, read the Der Spiegel piece on the possible EU project: it nicely outlines some of the problems, some of the recent insights and advances, and some emerging ideas that may yet bring this technology into the realm of commercial application. It's also the source of the following picture, the active plasma in a tokomak reactor.

Now, from the Telegraph (UK), is an article suggesting that even if Livermore's NIF fails to advance practical fusion power, the technology therein may still pay off big in terms of creating conditions of deep planetary interiors. This could lead to a better understanding of the earth's core, and even cores of giant planets such as Jupiter. The diamond anvil has been a useful, but limited investigative tool. I never imagined that our attempts to make fusion a commercially useful technology would provide tools to investigate geology. Stars, I might have guessed. Earth? Cool!