I am going to tell you why I think that we should invest money in developing fusion power. 
If you didn’t already know it, fusion is the process of forcing the deuterium and tritium isotopes of 
hydrogen together to form helium atoms, and free neutrons.
A very important reason for using fusion power is that it is very effective, 10 grams of Deuterium and 
15 grams of Tritium produces enough electric energy to last a life time for an average Swedish citizen.
If you tried to produce this amount of energy using tidal generators you would quickly reach the 
maximum capacity of the worlds coastlines.
Many people argument for using solar power, but for most countries this is impossible, as it would 
require a much larger area than can be provided. This means that both solar power and tidal generators 
are impossible to use for supplying the world with the energy needed.
Of course, these two aren’t the only competition against fusion power. Fossil fuels like oil, gas and 
coal have been used for quite awhile, but they have 2 things in common, they consume a lot of natural 
resources, and are bad for the environment.
But there is one power source that offers fusion some competition, but not because it is better, but it 
already exists. I am talking about fission power, which is what we normally associate with nuclear 
power. You could say that fission is the opposite of fusion, since in fission you split the atoms. As 
almost everyone knows fission produces radioactive waste, which is one downside. Too be honest 
fusion also produces radioactive waste, but it has a much shorter half-life, only 1/10 of that formed in 
fission reactors. There is one more problem with fission, it requires a special isotope of Uranium, 
which will be in short supply in a couple of decades. This won’t be a problem with fusion, since fuel 
for fusion reactors is produced from water and lithium.
This was some of the scientific fact about fusion and it’s competition. From this you can see why 
fusion is the best alternative.
But there are other facts to be considered; for example the economy. As I said before, 10 grams of 
Deuterium and 15 grams of Tritium produces enough energy to last a lifetime of an average Swedish 
citizen. This makes fusion power very economic, once it is up and running. But the investment cost for 
developing fusion power is much larger. Since there isn’t any fully functional reactors we first have to 
build a test reactor. For a long time such a reactor was planned, it was named ITER, but the enormous 
cost of 60 billion Swedish crowns made the investors back out, which resulted in the plan for a much 
smaller reactor named ITER light, this reactor will only cost 25 billion Swedish crowns.
For all the above stated reasons I believe that we should the money for building this reactor. If we 
don’t build it the entire field of fusion power will be severely delayed. The current plan is to build 
ITER in 2001, and a second reactor named DEMO in 2020. Which would lead to a commercial reactor 
by 2040. If we don’t build ITER now, it will not be possible to build DEMO in time, since it relies on 
the experiences gained from ITER.
But there is one even greater danger, without ITER there won’t be any large reactors to attract new 
scientist to the field of fusion power, which could mean the end of fusion power research.
From this I draw my conclusion that we must invest in fusion power, and we must invest in it now.