Fusion is a promised type of nuclear-plasma energy that is nearly without any waste products. It essentially entails building a miniature star on earth with a heat of approximately 150 million degrees and containing it within powerful magnetic shields. Engineers and physicists have been working on the wicked problems of fusion energy for approximately eighty years now. Despite international multi-billion dollar mega-projects to develop viable fusion energy, it remains thirty, fifty, or even 100 years away—at best. The struggle and drive to attain such a source of clean nuclear power leads skilled and disciplined people from all across the globe to labour for events and infrastructures that they will likely never get to see through to completion, reminding us perhaps of the conviction of medieval cathedral builders, who laboured on projects whose durations were also measured in centuries.

There is an undoubtable link between plasma physics and religion, or between rationality and the ineffable: that which cannot be measured or spoken and which in fact resists these acts. Speaking through the origin of physics’ alchemical/religious histories into a possible future with fusion reactors powering fifteen percent of the planet’s energy needs, Thomson plays with and attends to the hierarchies of knowledge and reality that are fundamental to these disciplines’ traditions, desires, and expectations, perhaps revealing a non-linear chronometry that can transform and renew contemporary modes of logic and sense.

This performance lecture is the partial outcome of research and fieldwork into the state of European fusion energy with sound artist Julian Weaver, a commission awarded by the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities’ Creating Earth Futures commission, 2018. The artists travelled for research and fieldwork to the Joint European Tokamak (JET) facilities in the UK and to the multi-billion dollar, global partner construction site of the International Thermonuclear Energy Research (ITER) site in Marseille, France.