No future for fusion power, says top scientist

David L Chandler reports for New Scientist that there is no future for fusion power:

Nuclear fusion will never be a practical source of electrical power, argues a prominent scientist in the journal Science.

Even nuclear fusion’s staunchest advocates admit a power-producing fusion plant is still decades away at best, despite forty years of hard work and well over $20 billion spent on the research. But the new paper, personally backed by the journal’s editor, issues a strong challenge to the entire fusion programme, arguing that the whole massive endeavour is never likely to lead to anything practical or useful.

Now that that’s settled, we can get all those nuclear physicists working on some of the really important problems, like creating a variety of broccoli that tastes like chocolate.