My take on nuclear fusion.

Well it is time to torture people with my take on some science stuff. Why? Because I can't sleep!
For a long time scientists have been trying to harvest the power of the sun, or to put it more precisely, what powers the sun. No, I am not talking solar panels. I am talking fusion, the process of joining two hydrogen nuclei to make a helium atom. That is a basic explanation because there is a little more to it than that.
Now you may say scientists have created fusion in the lab and with hydrogen bombs and you would be correct. What they have not done is harness the reaction, to control it for any length of time that would allow the reaction to provide power. You see, when scientists create a fusion reaction in a lab using something like a tokamak reactor or using lasers they are only able to sustain the reaction for a fraction of a second before things break down, confinement normally.
Right now the main way scientists try to contain the reaction is by the use of magnetic fields (electromagnetic). The problem is it requires more energy to create the fields for confinement than what energy is generated by the reaction.
If you look at the sun, (not directly without a filter) you see a nice shaped sphere more or less. This shape is because the mass of the sun and of other stars is enough to act as a containment field. (This is not 100% because sometimes magnetic fields on the sun go wonky and we have a solar flare)
What is really funny about gravity as the confinement field is that in physics gravity is considered a weak force, much weaker than the electromagnetic force. But how can a weak force act as a means of confinement for sustained fusion reaction? It has to do with strength in numbers. Each atom has gravitational pull because it has mass. The gravitational field of an individual atom maybe quite small but when you get enough together in a particular volume of space you have a larger field. In fact if the field is strong enough because there is enough mass in a particular area (this is a basic definition of density) that hydrogen will heat up and start a fusion reaction. When the fusion reaction commences then there will be an outward push by the energy created (radiation pressure). If the radiation pressure pushes outward with the same force as the gravitational force pushing in you have achieved equilibrium and you have a star that will stay that way until something changes to upset the balance.
What scientists are trying to do is create that equilibrium in a lab on a small scale, too small for Gravity to be a factor so they need use force, electromagnetic. Here is the rub, the fusion reaction creates its own electromagnetic fields and it is these fields that cause the confinement to collapse when they interact with the confinement field. There is some hope as there is work being done to use the fusion generated fields to help in confinement. I do not know the specifics but maybe by sensing the fluctuations in the fusion generated magnetic field and adjusting the confinement field to compensate.
What would make things easier, though it is improbable, is to be able to generate and/or manipulate a gravitational field to act as a confinement field. Of course to be efficient the energy used to generate the confinement field needs to be less than the energy output of the fusion reaction.
So this is another of my "interesting things I think about" post.