Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

It verified the Soviet claims, and since that time, PPPL has been a worldwide leader in tokamak theory and design, building a series of record-breaking machines including the Princeton Large Torus, TFTR and many others.

While leaving for a ski trip to Aspen in February 1951, his father called and told him to read the front page of the New York Times.

The paper had a story about claims released the day before in Argentina that a relatively unknown German scientist named Ronald Richter had achieved nuclear fusion in his Huemul Project.

As the device would produce high-energy neutrons, which could be used for breeding weapon fuel, the program was classified and carried out as part of Project Matterhorn.

Spitzer became extremely skeptical that fusion energy was possible and expressed this opinion in very public fashion in 1965 at an international meeting in the UK.

At the next meeting in 1968, the Soviets presented considerable data from their devices that showed even greater performance, about 100 times the Bohm diffusion limit.

Seeing the possibility of being bypassed in the fusion field, PPPL eventually agreed to convert the Model C to what became the Symmetric Tokamak (ST), quickly verifying the approach.

Starting in 1975, PLT verified these "scaling laws" and then went on to add neutral beam injection from Oak Ridge that resulted in a series of record-setting plasma temperatures, eventually topping out at 78 million kelvins, well beyond what was needed for a practical fusion power system.

With this string of successes, PPPL had little trouble winning the bid to build an even larger machine, one specifically designed to reach "breakeven" while running on an actual fusion fuel, rather than a test gas.

Studies of electron heating in PFRC-2 reached 500 eV with pulse lengths of 300 ms.[10] In 2015, PPPL completed an upgrade to NSTX to produce NSTX-U that made it the most powerful experimental fusion facility, or tokamak, of its type in the world.

[15][16] Laboratory scientists are collaborating with researchers on fusion science and technology at other facilities, including DIII-D in San Diego, EAST in China, JET in the United Kingdom, KSTAR in South Korea, the LHD in Japan, the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) device in Germany, and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France.

The lab delivered 75% of components for the fusion energy experiment's electrical network in 2017 and has been leading the design and construction of six diagnostic tools for analyzing ITER plasmas.

[23] Staff are applying knowledge gained in fusion research to a number of theoretical and experimental areas including materials science, solar physics, chemistry, and manufacturing.