www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7936284/Fusion-research-at-Iter-unlocking-the-power-of-the-sun.html
It is one of mankind's most daring experiments - a quest to produce virtually limitless clean energy that, if successful, would revolutionise life on Earth by harnessing the explosive power of the sun.
The energy problems that already beset our species, and look certain to dominate the future, would be wiped out at a stroke.
Such is the appeal of the idea that the greatest powers of the world, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, America and the nations of the European Union, have united to pursue the same stellar objective. Their aim is commercially viable nuclear fusion - deriving energy from crushing together the nuclei in atoms rather than splitting them, as is done currently in nuclear fission reactors.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
PS: BMW suck www.badmotorworks.com
Why don't we just run a bigarse cable to the sun and plug it in?
...... its only 93million miles, should be a snap 
Theres enough energy from the sun in 1 day to power the whole world for a year, i say run the power leads, just make sure they have been tested and tagged.
The Sun probably produces enough energy in 24 hours to power every single energy consuming device on Earth for about a million years.
The problem with fusion is it always seems to be about 20 years away or as the article says, about 40 years away. The article was interesting and hopefully fusion is going to happen. If there is a serious, successful effort to develop fusion power, such technology will destroy many vested interests. In a flick of the switch all the world's coal and oil companies will be worthless. Imagine owning 20 million dollars worth of ExxonMobil shares and waking up to find your shares are worth nothing?
I suspect we'd find some more creative, value-adding uses for all those millions-of-years-old complex organic hydrocarbons that we currently just burn for their energy.
The nuclear fusion process doesn't produce plastics, bitumen, wax, lubrication (oil-based!!! Errrr...getting off-topic...), etc, etc.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
A clean and abundant fission cycle...
Professor Carlo Rubbia proposed the concept of an energy amplifier or "accelerator driven system" (ADS), a novel and safe way of producing nuclear energy exploiting present-day accelerator technologies, which is actively being studied worldwide in order to incinerate high activity waste from accelerators, and produce energy from natural thorium and depleted uranium. The energy resources potentially deriving from these fuels will be practically unlimited and comparable to those from nuclear fusion...
A bit of trivia - An Australian called M.L.E.Oliphant worked with a Kiwi (Rutherford) and a German (Harteck) in 1934 to create the first artificial fusion reaction.
Unfortunately they didn't think of the long power cord option.
