Historical Background

In the late 1920s, Atkinson and Houtermans suggested that the Sun's energy might be derived from thermonuclear reactions and a decade later the nuclear fusion cycle for energy production in the Sun was postulated. In 1932 Rutherford, Walton and Cockroft detected the capture of a proton by an atom of Lithium 7, via the subsequent production of two a particles and the released of energy.

Two years later, Rutherford, Oliphant and Harteck succeeded in fusing two deuterons - yielding either ³He and a neutron or tritium and a proton (both reactions releasing energy).

Fusion research in the United States and in the USSR has its roots in the atomic weapons research performed during and after the Second World War.

In 1951, the Argentinian dictator Juan PerÚn announced that his country had an operational fusion plant. This was one of the factors which precipitated the research undertaken by the astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer at Princeton.

Also in 1951, the Soviet physicists Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm designed what would later be called a tokamak (toroidalnya kamera ee magnetnaya katushka).

In the United Kingdom, much of the research was carried out at Harwell where the most famous fusion device, ZETA, made the news headlines early in 1958 with the announcement by British physicists that they had produced fusion neutrons - a claim which would later be withdrawn.

All fusion research remained classified until the 1958 ´Atoms for Peaceª conference in Geneva, where the exchange of information clearly showed that more detailed knowledge of plasma behaviour was required. This led to an increase in theoretical research during the 1960s.

In the Soviet Union in 1968, Kurchatov's T3 Tokamak made an important breakthrough and Tokamak confinement studies became widespread during the following decades.

In the 1970s, fusion research became ´big scienceª. The cost and complexity of the devices involved grew to such an extent that only through international cooperation could the necessary technical knowledge be unifiedand the projects financed.

In 1978, the European Community (plus Sweden and Switzerland) undertook to construct the JET (´Joint European Torusª) project near Abingdon (United Kingdom). The device JET produced its first plasma in June 1983, and achieved equivalent scientific breakeven with deuterium before carrying out successful experiments with a deuterium-tritium fuel mix in November 1991.

In the United States, the PLT Tokamak at Princeton produced a plasma temperature of more than 60 million degrees in 1978. From the mid-80s, also at Princeton, experiments were performed on the TFTR (´Tokamak fusion test reactorª), in which a deuterium-tritium experiments began in 1993.

In Japan, since 1988, experiments were carried out on the JT-60 Tokamak, which has subsequently been improved (JT-60U).

The JET Tokamak of the European Community, based in Abingdon (UK), is the largest and most powerful in the World.