In the long term, possibly over the course, of the next several thousands of years the use of our current energy technologies, and many proposed, potential interim solutions are unfortunately not scalable to the implied demand. From preliminary considerations it seems a viable long term solution should be able to supply hundreds of terawatts of power reliably, over a global distribution grid with minimal ecological side effect.

International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)

The obvious candidates for such a global power grid might be space based systems of some form, with transit ports to ground distribution hubs. One of the many challenges of space based systems is the stability, and geosynchronous properties of the implied orbit combined with the large transmission gap, not to mention numerous other factors.

Alternatively a ground based system of some form embedded in interlinked distribution hubs would ideally be for the most part self contained, with negligeable emissions other than useable electric power and heat. One of the potential candidates for such a ground based system is a particular fusion reactor design, or "Tokamak", which is a Russian language acronym for "Toriodal Magnetic Chamber". The main advantage of the fusion design is the lack of toxic heavy nuclei waste materials associated with fission reactors. One would like to create a very high effective temperature, constrained plasma in the D-shaped toroidal region (cut away above), thereby inducing fusion particle interactions with net energy surplus emission.

Deuterium Tritium Particle Fusion

One of the possibilities is Deuterium/Tritium fuel injection into the plasma formation while Alpha particles (Helium nuclei), neutrons and energy are formed and removed. Simulation of critical reactor features (re: above) might benefit from a wide range of nuclear physics simulation code mounted on a supercomputing platform. The fusion of Deuterium and Tritium to create Helium is accomplished by promoting the relative collision energies of the incident nuclei to high kinetic energy, combined with a reasonable interaction cross section, for a given plasma configuration, to produce sustainable power emission greater than that used to inject the kinetic energy.

The resulting power surplus is removed by a combination of collection mechanisms tuned to the reactors eccentricities, at particular operating parameters. The fusion reaction is continuously monitored by redundant computer controls with the input energy being reduced to modulate potential run away conditions. In any case the intrinsic geometry is not sufficient to produce a large explosion, should the reactor fail, and the fallout though not completely harmless is far less so than that from a fission system. The reactors must be shutdown and rigorously rebuilt to specification on a regular preventive maintenance schedule. All of the critical internal parts must be replaced regularly due to degradation at the atomic lattice level from the continuous bombardment, of high energy particles. The removed critical parts must be kept in a radiation containment system until such time as the emissions are below potentially harmful levels.