From nuclear power to fusion nuclear energy

The history of thermonuclear fusion, which is over 50 years long, now has come to a stage expected to pave the way to the industrial implementation of fusion energy. The euphoria, which has spread in the society after the success of thermonuclear arms' tests and first fission reactors, has also influenced plasma physicists, which then promised to launch fusion power plants within the next 20 years. However, the science development has shown once again, how cautiously such projections should be treated. Specialists have clearly underestimated the complexity of the task to create a fusion energy source for the Earth conditions. It took several decades of fundamental plasma process research to give birth to a new area of science-the hot plasma physics. Only thanks to the development of this discipline, parameters of fusion installations have gradually approached the diapason, which was of interest for a fusion power reactor. Today the plasma physics has enough theoretical and experimental achievements to transfer, from theory to practice, the issue of constructing the first fusion reactor, with power yielded from fusion reactions exceeding by an order of magnitude the energy spent for supporting the reactor plasma. Physicist have reasons to believe that the prospects of nuclear fusion energy (thermonuclear energy), which is called to eliminate the problem of limited energy resources, could become a reality in the second half of the XXI century