Let’s Just Flip the Switch
There is a machine. Thirty-five countries have invested billions of dollars to make it work. When completed, it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons. If its switch is ever finally flipped, the goal will be the creation of a new form of energy that could save the planet: “Beams of uncharged particles — the energy in them so great it could vaporize a car in seconds — will pour into the chamber, adding tremendous heat. In this way, the circulating hydrogen will become ionized, and achieve temperatures exceeding two hundred million degrees Celsius — more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core.” (And I thought I was doing my part by driving a hybrid.) The New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian shares the story of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a star in a bottle.