Inertial Fusion vs. Magnetic Inertia

The recent success at Lawrence Livermore Lab cited by President Eisgruber was in the field of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and says nothing about prospects for the radically different field of magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), which is PPPL’s area of activity. While the ICF results are the most important in 70 years of controlled fusion research, there has been insignificant progress in the last quarter century toward achieving meaningful thermonuclear plasmas in MCF.

The fusion pilot plants alluded to are pure fantasy, as they are based on high-energy-gain MCF plasmas that nobody has ever come close to producing.  The ITER project is supposed to produce such plasmas in the 2030s, but repeated delays raise the issue of whether ITER will ever become operational.

As for the NSTX-U device shown in the photo, several magnetic coils on this tokamak broke down after a few weeks of operation in 2016, and its so-called “recovery project” has dragged on for 7 years at colossal expense with no end in sight.  Rebuilding NSTX-U has become PPPL’s “forever war.”

Whether consciously or inadvertently, PPPL’s management seems to sense a dead-end future for MCF as the laboratory has embarked on a campaign to direct half the lab’s research enterprise to low-temperature, decidedly non-fusion plasmas, such as for microelectronics production and materials studies.

Princeton University has installed many acres of photovoltaic panels in numerous locations to convert the product of solar fusion energy to electricity.  That’s as close as anyone will ever come in this century to exploiting fusion-based energy for power production.