Timeline of Nuclear Fusion

Timeline of nuclear fusion

• 1929 – Atkinson and Houtermans used the measured masses of light
  elements and applied Einstein’s discovery that E=mc2 to predict that
  large amounts of energy could be released by fusing small nuclei
  together.
• 1939 – Hans Bethe won the Nobel Prize in physics (awarded 1968) for
  quantitative theory explaining fusion
• shortly after World War II and the success of the Manhattan Project the
  hydrogen bomb was built, which released large amounts of fusion energy
  from a reaction ignited by a fission trigger
• 1951 – Argentina publicly claimed that they had harnessed controlled
  nuclear fusion (these claims were false), sparking a responsive
  research effort in the U.S.
  • Lyman Spitzer started the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (or
    PPPL) which was originally codenamed Project Matterhorn – most
    early work was done on a type of magnetic confinement device
    called a stellarator.
  • James Tuck, an English physicist, began research at Los Alamos
    National Laboratory (LANL) under the codename of project Sherwood,
    working on pinch magnetic confinement devices. (Some people
    claimed that the project was named Sherwood based on Friar Tuck)
  • 1952 Edward Teller expanded hydrogen bomb research at Lawrence
    Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and began studying inertial
    confinement using high powered lasers.
• 1952 – Cousins and Ware build a small toroidal pinch device in England,
  and demonstrate that instabilities in the plasma make pinch devices
  inherently unstable.
• 1953 – pinch devices in the US and USSR attempt to take the reactions
  to fusion levels without worrying about stability. Both report
  detections of neutrons, which are later explained as non-fusion in
  nature.
• 1954 – ZETA stabilized toroidal pinch device starts operation in
  England.
• 1958 – American, English and Soviet scientists began to share
  previously classified fusion research, as their countries declassified
  controlled fusion work as part of the Atoms for Peace conference in
  Geneva (an amazing development considering the Cold War political
  climate of the time)
• 1958 – ZETA experiments end. Several firings produce neutron spikes
  that the researchers initially attribute to fusion, but later realize
  are due to other effects. Last few firings show an odd “quiet period”
  of long stability in a system that otherwise appeared to prove itself
  unstable. Research on pinch machines generally dies off as ZETA appears
  to be the best that can be done.
• 1967 – Demonstration of Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor appears to generate
  neutrons in a nuclear reaction.
• 1968 – Results from the T-3 Soviet magnetic confinment device, called a
  tokamak, which Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm and Andrei Sakharov had been
  working on – showed the temperatures in their machine to be over an
  order of magnitude higher than what was expected by the rest of the
  community. The western scientists visited the experiment and varified
  the high temperatures and confinement, sparking a wave of optimism for
  the prospects of the tokamak as well as construction of new
  experiments. which is still the dominant magnetic confinement device
  today.
• 1974 – Taylor re-visits ZETA results of 1958 and explains that the
  quiet-period is in fact very interesting. This leads to the development
  of “reversed field pinch”, now generalized as “self-organizing
  plasmas”, an ongoing line of research.
• 1978 – The European Community (with Sweden and Switzerland) launched
  the JET (tokamak) project in the UK
• 1988 – The Japanese tokamak, JT-60 came online
• March 1989 – some scientists announced that they achieved cold fusion –
  causing fusion to occur at room temperatures. However, they made their
  announcements before any peer review of their work was performed, and
  no subsequent experiments by other researchers revealed any evidence of
  fusion.
• 1993 – The TFTR tokamak at Princeton (PPPL) does experiments with 50%
  deuterium, 50% tritium, which eventually produces as much as 10
  megawatts of power from a controlled fusion reaction.
• 1997 – The JET tokamak in the UK produces 16 MW of fusion power. This
  is roughly their break even point — producing as much fusion
  power as they were using to heat the plasma and sustain the reaction.
• 1997 – combining a field-reversed pinch with an imploding magnetic
  cylinder results in the new Magnetized Target Fusion concept. In this
  system a “normal” lower density plasma device is explosively squeezed
  using techniques developed for high-speed gun research.
• 2002 – Claims and counter-claims are published regarding bubble fusion,
  in which a table-top apparatus is reported as producing small-scale
  fusion in a liquid undergoing acoustic cavitation.