After graduation with a masters in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, Hirsch took a job at Atomics International and continued taking courses at ULCA.
[2] He entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's recently-created nuclear engineering course and was awarded the school's first PhD in the topic in 1964.
The proposal took almost a year to prepare and ultimately ended on the desk of the director of the AEC's fusion division, Amasa Bishop.
This was not entirely unexpected; during World War II experiments during the Manhattan Project suggested such leakage was common and led to the Bohm diffusion rule.
But by the 1960s, with no improvements in sight, even Lyman Spitzer, one of fusion's greatest proponents, eventually concluded Bohm diffusion was a law.
In 1965 during an international meeting on fusion in the UK, Soviet researchers presented preliminary data from a new style of machine known as the tokamak that they suggested was beating the Bohm limit.
During this period the UK fusion teams had been developing a new diagnostic technique using lasers that Artsimovich had already publicly called "brilliant".
[7] The team, "the Culham Five" made a confidential call to the AEC in the summer of 1969: the machine worked, it was even better than the Soviet measurements.
In particular, Harold Furth of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory continued to make a string of complaints about the results to the point of raising Hirsch's ire.
Furth's boss, Mel Gottlieb, eventually convinced him to convert their Model C stellarator to a tokamak, even if just to prove the Soviets wrong.
In 1971, it was Hirsch who presented the division's latest updates to Congress and made the public declaration that if increased funding were available, a commercial demonstration plant could be operational in 1995.
Then, in June 1973, Richard Nixon announced the AEC's alternative energy budget would be dramatically increased and left to Ray to decide how to spend.
Doing so would be a tangible advance that could convince Congress to continue funding the program, although to do so the reactor would have to run on D-T fuel, which would complicate matters.
[14] Soon after, President Carter took office and the new administration began cutting the fusion budget with an eye to stretching it out over time.
[15] Carter put Schlesinger back in the directorship, and when Hirsch met with him he was told they would find a position for him if he wanted.
His previous management positions include: Hirsch has served as a consultant and on advisory committees for government and industry.