hosted a celebration Thursday in a building the size of an airplane hangar in Poway, attended by scientists and local VIPs.

All the fuss was about a big round piece of metal on display before the seated crowd. It was one part of a magnet, so powerful it could lift an aircraft carrier out of the water. The item on display at General Atomics was only one-sixth of the whole assembly. The other five parts will be stacked on top of it, making it the height of a five-story building.

Those five parts are already en route to France, to an international fusion plant called , formerly the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The people running the project have given the magnet a name: the Central Solenoid.

John Smith has been working on this magnet since the project was conceived in

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