From the inside cover -

“Fusion power, the energy source of the sun and stars, may well be mankind’s ultimate energy source. In the next century, as other sources are exhausted or cast aside for environmental reasons, fusion will very likely stand as the prime source of abundant, permanent, and safe energy. but today, the development of fusion is more potential than reality, a fascinating mixture of scientific, political economic, and personal forces competing and conspiring to achieve the big breakthroughs on the road to inexhaustible energy.

In The Man-Made Sun T.A. Heppenheimer brings this exciting world to life. With the vividness of The Double Helix and the immediacy of The Soul of a New Machine, he takes us into the laboratories and Washington offices where fusion’s future is being shaped. In clear and conscientious language he outlines how scientists are going about challenging nature itself, wrestling with the most difficult problems physics has ever faced. He explains the two major and competing approaches to solving the most important problems, one being tried at Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, the other at Princeton University. In the very near future, one of these two approaches will prevail, bringing honor, jobs, future contracts, and large amounts of federal dollars to the winning lab, and very little to the loser.…

The Man-Made Sun takes us from a dimly lit control room at Princeton, where for the first time a controlled temperature of 100 million degrees centigrade has been achieved, to the top secret laboratory where the world’s largest lasers are being designed; from a standoff over funding in a conference room in Washington to the offices of a maverick independent center premier who has invented the world’s first commercial fusion reactor. The Man-Made Sun is a story of the frontiers of science, a story that has never been told before, filled with action, excitement, and the thrill of great scientific discovery.”

This book is a hardcover first edition published in 1984. It includes diagrams and a few sections on different paper showing black and white photographs. The dust cover is damaged, but the book itself is in very good condition, with no creases on the pages and the only obvious flaw being a sticker mark on the first page from the cover. See pictures for details.