So that's my fusion reactor in the background there.

I can allow the electron to come in and get absorbed.

Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old.

Now most of you are probably saying, well there's no such thing as nuclear fusion.

A star is the most simple object.

And this probably is not what you're expecting.

Sure, we can alter elements by nuclear fusion or nuclear fission.

But there is a catch. Of course there is always a catch in these cases.

This whole station is basically a big fusion reactor. Right?

Is it cost competitive?

Nuclear energy is produced by splitting atoms or by bringing them together.

And just down the road, this is JET.

It gets very expensive to do this research.

We can do fusion.

I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is.

I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers.

(Laughter)

I think about World War II some of our great technologists then, some of our great physicists, studying nuclear fission and fusion just nuclear stuff.

I say, Yeah, but we've actually done it. Right?

We'll come to this.

The key question is, When are we going to get fusion?

It boils away in the middle at 150 million degrees.

So 2030 looks like an infinity away.

And I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be that point, that the bridge that T. Boone Pickens talked about will get us to.

And in 2013 we're going to fire it up again and break all those records.

If we could do that, we'd automatically have an energy supply, because this transmutation would be a fusion reactor.

Experiments with plutonium based fast breeder reactors in France and Japan have been expensive failures.

The physicist was aware of the potential danger of nuclear fusion.

A mindmeld?

I have the first congruency.

And lithium is in sea water. That's the yellow line.

We've got to take that, we've got to make that into a fusion reactor.

So, where is he getting all this silicon necessary to make the sand?

Fused as one.

And we have 30 million years worth of fusion fuel in sea water.

I've developed a device that, on a very small scale, can produce these isotopes.

And that's the way you make your tritium.

But that's not really fusion power. That's just making some fusion happen.

There are other kinds of smallpox that are not like that.

I have to meld with you.

Its volume increases roughly by a factor of 1000.

We've been trying for 50 years.

Here, the predictions of the Big Bang nucleosynthesis in plot it in one diagram.

It's the only machine in the world that's actually done fusion.

But this is what we're aiming at, sometime in the 2030s real electric power from fusion.