If realised on Earth, fusion power offers a near unlimited supply of clean, sustainable power.  The quest for harnessing fusion on Earth is almost as old as the Manhattan project, but fiendishly more difficult.  To zeroth order, the scale and magnitude of the challenge can be understood by engineering and physics constraints.  Whether they can be solved however to produce baseload power is an open question, and has long been a generator of an interesting mathematical problems.

In this talk I will outline a 0-D model of a fusion power plant, scope pathways to achieve an ignited power producing plasma, and focus on the mathematical and computational problems generated by this challenge.  The lecture assumes only an elementary knowledge of physics.

Afternoon tea will be provided at 3:30pm