Here's my best guess (and I'm a second year ECE major, so I know some physics, but not THAT much...):

Fusion requires a lot of heat, because the point is to be atoms flying around really, really fast, so when they smash into each other they stick together and make a bigger atom, instead of bouncing apart. Heat is really a measure of atomic activity (meaning, lots of heat makes atoms move very fast). So the idea behind the fusion reactor is that if we get a certain area hot enough, all we have to do is keep adding fuel and it will sustain the reaction. (think of it as a normal wood fire, only instead of chemical energy being freed from the wood, its atomic energy being released from sea water. Once you get a wood fire going, all you have to do is add wood, same idea with the sea water.) So that's how you get energy from fusion.

The issue is that the temperatures required will melt anything that is in contact with it. The solution is to use magnetic fields to hold all the fuel away from the walls of the container. A toroid (picture a donut, with a magnetic field flowing inside of it) is the best way to do it, because its fairly easy to make one (basically you take a solenoid and stick both ends together to make a circle) and its a more stable field than trying to get a spherical container.

Hope this helps!

Jim

I'm not in favor of my tax dollars being used to support the education of people who can't manage to get a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon on their own. I managed to (turned it down) and if I can do it then so can a fair number of other works who don't have rich parents. And this is back in day when colleges and universities actually had standards that were fairly difficult to meet.

It must be genuinely wonderful to be able to go through life so completely oblivious to a problem. You've actually managed to loose the story line of the article, which, by the way.is: the problems with American schools being equipped with the competent staff, who by the way, are meant to train these very folks who aren't bright enough and whom you so deride for not being able to play a financial-allotment system that no doubt has changed drastically in the X-years since you have graduated.

But rather than actually address that issue, you've gone off on a rant about how today's college students obviously must be idiots for their inability to win "merit scholarships." And what is more, you actually have the nerve to say "I'm not in favor of my tax dollars being used to support the education of people who can't manage to get a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon on their own" to a young man who has not only earned his way into a a pretigious school (and yes, they do actually make you apply to college these days, which means getting-in is something you've actually earned ), but who has also voluntarily given up the next half-decade of his life, to spend it thousands of miles away from those he loves, and yet remain committed to an organization dedicated to defending the likes of YOU, who would deride him for it.

Not only did you manage to completely lose the point of the article -- which, has absolutely nothing to do with religion, though you chose that as the easiest avenue of attack -- but you actually used it as a means to puff yourself up.

Address the article and the problem, not a tangeant issue so far on the periphery that it bears no relevance to the issue at hand. And then, please be so kind as to stop the hot air.