 Nuclear power without the dangerous radiation, the tantalizing dream of the Tokamak reactor on this edition of Science Alive. And it's Anna Adamak, she's a curator of natural resources here at Science and Technology Museums in Canada. We're wearing gloves. And standing in front of a dream, what's the dream we're in front of? The dream is the dream of nuclear fusion. We are in front of Tokamak, Canada's nuclear fusion reactor. Now, nuclear fusion, that's different than what a nuclear reactor is. There are two types of nuclear reactor, nuclear fusion reactor, which fuses together in nuclei. And nuclear fusion reactors, which break atoms apart. We are in front of the nuclear fusion reactor. So the dream is it will produce electricity differently than what we do now? Yes, it would produce huge amounts of clean and inexpensive energy. So no radiation? No radiation, no radioactive waste, very little fuel. And how old is this dream? Well, the dream goes back to 1940s, early 1950s, but in Canada actually this nuclear reactor went online in 1984. Now this is a great, big, huge science experiment. How do you build a Tokamak? Tokamak is basically a donut-shaped steel container. It has to be made of very high quality steel. You can see how shiny and polished the steel is. This is because we have to ensure that we achieve vacuum inside this container. So inside the Tokamak, you have magnets. These magnets allow us to create in the vacuum electromagnetic field. And that field contains very, very hot plasma and allows it to circulate very fast. And the plasma, so in this thing we'd be up and running, would it be glowing and we'd be seeing plasma through the windows? You would see some glow from it. You would see the plasma quickly circulating inside until it achieves fusion. And the construction of this, like each individual bolt, how much would that cost to make? It's actually, this is something that's very interesting for a historian of technology to look at. It's this physical artifact. We can look at different elements. So each of those screws would cost about two to three hundred dollars. Each of the windows would cost about five hundred dollars. We can see which parts were custom made, which parts were ordered from catalogs. We can also see different notations that people left on the machine itself. So it shows us that relationship between scientists and the machine. One of the scientists actually signed his name on it. And what happened here? This doesn't look like stainless steel to me. So this to me is a proof that there was a vacuum leak in this machine, which would be a serious problem. Right. And it has been quite crudely repelled. Great. Now the vision of Taka-Mak is to generate clean electricity. How far away do you think we are from this overall global experiment ever being finished? I think we still have a way to go. We do see that there was, we see splatter of plasma inside the Taka-Mak. So we know that plasma was circulating there at a very high speed. We also see little snowflakes that tell us that there was electrical discharge, but there is no evidence of actually fusion. Great. So the experiment continues? The experiment continues. Anna, thank you for explaining the Taka-Mak to us. Thank you.