Recent developments in controlled fusion

MAR 01, 1964

This review of work under Project Sherwood, with emphasis on the Princeton stellarator program, is based on invited papers presented at the Northeastern Conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers on November 4, 1963, and at a meeting of the American Nuclear Society on January 6, 1964. Dr. Bishop is a physicist on the research staff of the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3051465

A. S. Bishop

The basic problems of controlled fusion are well known. Briefly they are the following: first, with deuterium or a deuterium‐tritium mixture, to produce a pure low‐density plasma of exceedingly high temperature (several hundred million degrees Kelvin—i.e., several tens of thousands of electron volts); second, to confine this plasma adequately and stably by means of an appropriate magnetic field configuration for a sufficiently long time that an appreciable fraction of the nuclei can undergo fusion; and finally, to capture the energy released and harness it for useful purposes.

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More about the authors

A. S. Bishop, Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory.