Nuclear Fusion

This book offers an accessible overview of the diverse approaches being pursued to make fusion energy a reality. Rather than diving into the underlying physics or speculating over future predictions, it focuses on what can be known today: the technologies, the experiments, the challenges, and the players shaping the field.

Organised into four parts, the book begins with a broad introduction to fusion before presenting a clear, structured overview of the major approaches, complete with up‑to‑date snapshots and profiles of key public laboratories and private companies in the field. Chapters explore the cross-cutting scientific, engineering, and safety issues that every fusion concept must confront, including radiation protection and non‑proliferation. The book concludes with a discussion on economics, outlining the market realities and uncertainties that will influence the future of the industry.

With minimal mathematics and a balanced analysis of pros and cons for each approach, this book empowers readers to critically evaluate and understand the real, current trajectory of fusion research.

Whether you're curious about the science, intrigued by the technology, or watching the emerging fusion economy, this is an essential guide to this rapidly evolving field.

Key features:

• An accessible introduction to different approaches in nuclear fusion.
• Discusses the latest technologies advancing the field and their pros, cons and problems.
• Minimal mathematics and accessible to a general audience without a formal, scientific background.

Andrea Di Vita is a physicist with 20+ years expertise in nuclear fusion, thermodynamics and thermoacoustics. After graduating cum laude in plasma physics with a dissertation on radiofrequency heating of tokamak plasmas, he has been working in the energy industry for decades, as well as Visiting Scientist at both ENEA, JET and Università di Genova. He has worked on both the time-dependent energy balances of IGNITOR and SPARC tokamaks, the non-inductive current drive in the JET tokamak, the energy balance and the saturation process of the neutron yield in a dense plasma focus, and the collisions between plasmoids in the heliosphere. He has also worked on the electrical conductivity of flames, the simulation of radiative arcs in high-voltage circuit-breakers, the saturation of thrust in magnetoplasmadynamic thruster for space propulsion, the onset of thermoacoustic instabilities, and the thermodynamics of relaxation in plasmas and the related variational principles. Dr. Di Vita has authored and co-authored 32 publications on these topics, as well as one handbook on non-equilibrium thermodynamics.