There's an old gag about fusion power - "Its 30 years in the future and always will be" ..this book pretty much expands on that saying, first giving us a layman's guide to fission and fusion and then a potted history of their initial uses as weapons. There's a description of early fusion research and where it went wrong and the occasional cranks and deluded researchers. This historical section could have been expanded with more detail - its all over in about a chapter. The 1989 'cold fusion' claims and rebuttals get a chapter to themselves as do the more recent 'bubble fusion' experiments. The author is clearly not a big supporter of current efforts in the hot fusion field and ends up sounded rather cynical and jaded about the whole thing. We end with a (yet again) too brief survey of alternate 'desktop' fusion methods and a little meditation about 'the science of wishful thinking' to ram home his point.
I guess I was expecting a little more of a straight history of fusion efforts and ended up a little disappointed with this book, although it is a fine work of popular science.
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