雅思阅读 58: Bottling the Sun — The Long Road to Fusion（驯服太阳：核聚变的漫漫长路）

改编自 World Nuclear Association / ITER Organization（2025-2026）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://world-nuclear.org/Information-Library/Current-and-Future-Generation/Nuclear-Fusion-Power

Reading Passage

A. Fusion is, in the most literal sense, a star in a bottle. Inside the Sun, gravity crushes hydrogen atoms hard enough that their nuclei overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse into helium, releasing energy in the process. Repeating that trick on Earth is irresistible: the fuel, drawn from ordinary water and lithium, is effectively inexhaustible; the reaction produces none of the greenhouse gases of fossil fuels; and unlike conventional nuclear fission, it cannot run away in a meltdown, because the plasma simply cools and stops the instant the confinement fails. The waste problem is also far smaller than that of a fission reactor — short-lived activated materials rather than millennia-long spent fuel. Small wonder that fusion has been called the energy source of the future for more than half a century. The catch, which every generation of physicists has had to rediscover, is that making the Sun's conditions on Earth is ferociously difficult. The fuel must be heated to over a hundred million degrees — several times hotter than the core of the Sun, which cheats by having gravity we cannot match — and then held together long enough to burn.

B. The device most commonly used for this is the tokamak, a Russian-invented doughnut-shaped chamber in which the plasma is confined by powerful magnetic fields rather than by any material wall, because no wall could touch a hundred-million-degree gas. The physics rewards bigness. The longer the plasma can be confined, and the larger the machine, the easier it is to reach the point where the reaction produces more energy than it takes to heat and confine it — a figure of merit known as Q. Smaller tokamaks, however clever, lose too much heat out through their edges to reach that break-even. This is why the world's fusion powers did not try to build a power station first. They agreed, instead, to build a single very large experimental machine that would prove the reactor-scale physics: ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, now taking shape at Cadarache in southern France.

C. ITER is one of the most ambitious scientific collaborations ever attempted. Seven parties — China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States — represent more than thirty nations, and each has contributed components built to a common design: superconducting magnets, a vacuum vessel assembled from huge curved sectors, a divertor that exhausts heat, and a central solenoid of superconducting coils whose last modules arrived only in 2025. The project, originally conceived in the 1980s, has been plagued by delays and cost growth. Experiments were once planned to begin around 2018; under the revised baseline adopted in 2024, research operations are now scheduled for 2034, full magnetic energy for 2036, and deuterium-tritium operation — the point at which real fusion power is actually attempted — for 2039. That revision added roughly five billion euros to a total cost often quoted around twenty billion. Critics argue that the schedule keeps slipping; supporters reply that the engineering of components no one has ever built before was always going to be harder than the initial estimates assumed.

D. ITER is not the only machine making progress. The Joint European Torus, or JET, in the United Kingdom, has long held the record for fusion energy produced in a laboratory, with reactions reaching temperatures many times hotter than the Sun. In Japan, the JT-60SA tokamak, built jointly by Europe and Japan as the largest and most advanced machine of its kind before ITER, resumed operation in 2026 after a year of repairs and upgrades. In France, the WEST device sustained a plasma for 1,337 seconds in 2025 — a reminder that "long" is a relative word in fusion physics, but minutes of steady plasma is a real milestone on the way to a reactor that must run for days or months at a time. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, the EAST, has similarly extended its own records. None of these machines produces net power, but each is testing a piece of the puzzle — wall materials, plasma control, superconducting coils — that ITER will need all at once.

E. Even if ITER meets its 2039 targets, commercial power remains further away still. A demonstration reactor must not only produce energy but capture it, breed its own tritium from lithium, survive the intense neutron bombardment that degrades any material, and — crucially — return more electricity to the grid than its magnets and heaters consume. Skeptics note that fusion has been "thirty years away" for sixty years, and that private start-ups promising commercial plants this decade are often closer to marketing than to physics. Enthusiasts reply that the underlying science is now settled: the remaining problems are engineering, materials and cost, and those are problems that scale with investment rather than with waiting for a new theory. Whether fusion arrives in time to matter for the climate transition is the real question, and it is one that no physicist can honestly answer yet. The Sun, in a bottle, has been a long time bottling. What has changed in the last decade is not the physics — which was settled decades ago — but the engineering optimism, fuelled by private capital, that a smaller, faster, cheaper machine can sidestep the slow-motion behemoth in Provence. Whether those ventures can do what the laws of plasma say a large machine must do is itself an open question; ITER, for all its delays, is still the only device on the planet designed to prove the reactor-scale case. If it delivers, even late, it will hand the commercial builders the numbers they need. If it does not, fusion may remain, as it has for two generations, the permanent answer to the question humanity keeps asking itself about its energy future.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Why fusion needs extreme heat and a magnetic cage ii. The ITER collaboration and its slipping schedule iii. Smaller machines testing the pieces of the puzzle iv. The gap between experimental physics and commercial power v. A brief history of solar astronomy vi. How superconducting magnets are manufactured vii. The global market for natural gas

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Why is ITER built on such a large scale? A. Plasma confinement improves with size. B. It houses a visitor centre. C. Smaller reactors are physically impossible. D. It is designed to store tourist equipment.

6. Under the 2024 revised schedule, when is ITER expected to begin deuterium-tritium operation? A. 2018. B. 2034. C. 2039. D. 2050.

7. What did the French WEST device achieve in 2025? A. It sustained a plasma for 1,337 seconds. B. It delivered net electricity to the grid. C. It became the first commercial fusion plant. D. It operated below room temperature.

8. Which two light fuels are fused in a typical experimental fusion reaction? A. Uranium and plutonium. B. Deuterium and tritium. C. Coal and oxygen. D. Hydrogen and carbon.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Fusion reproduces inside a laboratory the same reaction that powers the Sun.
10. ITER is being constructed by a single European energy company.
11. The 2024 schedule revision added about five billion euros to ITER's estimated cost.
12. A commercial fusion power plant is expected to be feeding the grid by 2030.
13. Fusion researchers have unanimously agreed that commercial fusion will never be viable.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Fusion reactors aim to fuse light nuclei — specifically (14) __________ and tritium — at temperatures far hotter than the Sun, inside a tokamak whose superconducting (15) __________ confine the burning plasma.

答案与解析

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