Derek Charles Robinson FRS[1] (27 May 1941 – 2 December 2002) was a physicist who worked in the UK fusion power program for most of his professional career.
As his father was in the Royal Air Force, Robinson often moved and spent an average of eighteen months at any one primary school.
When ZETA first started operation in the summer of 1957, it gave off large bursts of neutrons, the most obvious sign of nuclear fusion reactions.
Over time the nature of the neutrons was explored and came to be understood as isolated events caused by instabilities inside the plasma.
As the nature of these problems became clear, the ZETA team turned from attempting fusion to developing dramatically improved diagnostic tools for characterizing the plasma.
However, the Soviets waited, perhaps wanting to avoid another ZETA debacle, until they were absolutely sure their machines were producing the numbers the measurements suggested they were.
This work carried on into 1967 and 68, which happened to correspond with the 3rd International Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion Research, being held in Novosibirsk in August 1968.
[6] Lev Artsimovitch addressed this concern, inviting "Bas" Pease to bring the ZETA team to the T-3 at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow.
But British concerns about possible defection meant that UK subjects with valuable knowledge could only travel to the USSR if "properly accompanied by a reliable person".
[5] Their paper, published in Nature in November 1969, led to a revolution in fusion research, as practically every other design concept was dumped in favour of tokamaks.
On his return to the UK in 1970, Robinson moved to the UKAEA laboratory in Culham, which was gathering together the previously spread-out fusion efforts.
His search for alternate solutions meant he was particularly receptive to Martin Peng of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US, who was trying to drum up interest in the spherical tokamak (STs) concept.
ST's were essentially small tokamaks, but a combination of features suggested they would offer greatly improved performance over conventional designs.
In 1990 Robinson was appointed UK member to the Joint European Torus (JET) project, after Culham was selected as the site for its construction.
Robinson, who was a fellow of the Institute of Physics, was also actively involved in the design of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).
At this time, the Director of the Physical Laboratories at Manchester was Brian Hilton Flowers, who had been Head of Theory at Harwell from 1952 to 1958.