| Nuclear fusion, a reality from 2011? |
 Nuclear fusion is something that scientists dream since the mid-40s, after the fission reaction has been obtained and that the first atomic bomb was created. Since then, nuclear energy has become a part of everyday life, with plants under construction around the world, from Korea to India, but also, of course, the USA, China , Russia and France, as you know. Smaller countries such as Romania and Bulgaria also have nuclear energy, providing electricity to a large percentage of their national power grids. Nuclear power plants require huge amounts of water to operate, as well as uranium, rare resource. The plants also raise the risk of leakage of radioactive material. This can easily contaminate the environment by radioactivity for decades and several hundred kilometers from the factory. Everyone remembers the case of nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island, USA (1979), and Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine (1986) with its famous radioactive cloud. Meanwhile, nuclear fusion offers the promise of clean energy. California, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL) and the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), through its Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST), based in Oxford, are the spearheads of the current development in this track. Soon the LLNL will have a laser capable of heating plasma at temperatures needed to achieve nuclear fusion. The development of the device is planned for 2009 and the first test starting in 2010. Researchers at the laboratory are confident that, by 2011 only, they can get to both durable and fully controllable nuclear fusion. The year 2020 was the coup defined as a milestone for the construction of the first commercial nuclear power plant operating on the principle of nuclear fusion. Sources: Imaginascience, Softpedia
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