It proposed to confine a deuterium fuel plasma to a toroidal (donut-shaped) chamber using magnets, and then heating it to fusion temperatures using radio frequency energy in the fashion of a microwave oven.
Over the next few years, Thomson continued to suggest starting an experimental effort to study these issues, but was repeatedly denied as the underlying theory of plasma diffusion was not well developed.
After the news furor over the Huemul Project in February 1951, significant funding was released and led to rapid growth of the program in the early 1950s, and ultimately to the ZETA reactor of 1958.
George Gamow's 1928 work on quantum tunnelling demonstrated that nuclear reactions could take place at lower energies than classical theory predicted.
Materials heated beyond a few tens of thousand Kelvin dissociate into their electrons and nuclei, producing a gas-like state of matter known as plasma.
The solenoid creates a magnetic field running down the centre of the tube, which the particles will orbit, preventing their motion towards the sides.
Thomson proposed injecting a cool plasma into the torus and then heating it with radio frequency signals beamed into the chamber.
This would ensure the origins of the concepts would be recorded, and prove that the ideas were due to efforts in the UK and not his previous work on the atom bomb.
Peierls pointed out that this "cross field" would cause the particles to be forced across the magnetic lines due to the right hand rule, causing the electrons to orbit around the chamber in the poloidal direction, eliminating the area of increased electrons in the center, and thereby allowing the ions to drift to the walls.
Using Thomson's own figures for the conditions in an operating reactor, Peierls demonstrated that the resulting neutralized region would extend all the way to the walls, by less than the radius of the electrons in the field.
In this version, the external magnets producing the toroidal field were removed, and confinement was instead provided by running a current through the plasma.
He calculated that a plasma density of 1015 would remain stable long enough for the energy of the pumped electrons to heat the D fuel to the required 100 keV over the time of several minutes.
[22] Thomson was then sent to New York City as part of the British delegation to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission and did not return until late in the year.
After he returned, in January 1947, John Cockcroft called a meeting at Harwell to discuss his ideas with a group including Peierls, Moon and Sayers from Birmingham University, Tuck from the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University, and Skinner, Frisch, Fuchs, French and Bretscher from Harwell.
Peierls reiterated his earlier concerns, mentioning the observations by Mark Oliphant and Harrie Massey who had worked with David Bohm on isotopic separation at Berkeley.
The parallels between this device and Thomson's concept were obvious, but Steenbeck's acceleration mechanism was novel and presented a potentially more efficient heating system.
[23] When he returned to London after the meeting, Thomson had two PhD students put on the project, with Alan Ware tasked with building a wirbelrohr and Stanley Cousins starting a mathematical study on diffusion of plasma in a magnetic field.
If, as Thomson described, one could make a relatively simple device that could produce plutonium there was an obvious nuclear security concern and such work would need to be secret.
AEI was looking to break into the emerging nuclear power field, and its director of research, Thomas Allibone, was a friend of Thomson's.
[25] Around the same time, Cockcroft learned of similar work carried out independently by Peter Thonemann at Clarendon, triggering a small theoretical program at Harwell to consider it.
Skinner then wrote a paper on the topic, "Thermonuclear Reactions by Electrical Means", and presented it to the Atomic Energy Commission on 8 April 1948.
Thompson complained that Harwell was not supporting their efforts, and that as none of this was classified, he wanted to remain open to turning to private funding.
The Ministry, who was in charge of the nuclear labs including Harwell, quickly arranged for Cockroft to fund Thompson's development program.
[27] The work on fusion at Harwell and Imperial remained relatively low-level until 1951, when two events occurred that changed the nature of the program significantly.
The earlier plans to move the team from Imperial were put into effect immediately, with the AEI labs being set up at the former Aldermaston and opening in April.
Physicists working on the concept suddenly found themselves able to talk to high-ranking politicians, who proved rather receptive to increasing their budgets.
[30] By the summer of 1952, the UK fusion program was developing several machines based on Thonemann's overall design, and Thomson's original RF-concept was put aside.