Abstract
Activity on tokamaks in Europe, including the early consolidation of European efforts via Euratom, is dealt with in some detail. The discovery of the high-confinement mode in 1982 in Germany resolved a seemingly lethal problem with plasma heating, the second breakthrough after the 1968 Russian tokamak result. Without this accidental discovery fusion would probably have found an early grave. It resulted among other things in a divertor becoming a standard component of the tokamak setup.
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Notes
- 1.
A joint European program was in part impossible as in some countries, notably France, nuclear fusion and fission research were carried out under the same roof and nuclear fission (still) had very strong ties with the military. An early European Commission had considered the possibility of a European institute and concluded that for the time being, “unless it can be demonstrated that a European laboratory is needed in order to build larger facilities that cannot be built by national groups, the many other advantages of such a centre may prove insufficient to overcome the difficulties in its creation and maintenance” (Curli 2017, p. 69). Of course, as is the case with CERN, when you have such a central laboratory there must be activity in the member countries to feed the laboratory with new ideas and manpower. Such a laboratory without close ties with universities and institutes in the member countries would soon die out, certainly for a long-term project like nuclear fusion.
- 2.
In the months leading up to the second Geneva conference , scientists and administrators connected with both CERN and Euratom formed a “European Study Group on Fusion” to consider the possibility that the high-energy physics laboratory might do work on plasma physics. Their main objective was to enable Europe to catch up in fusion research with the US, UK and Soviet Union and perhaps to make presentations at the Geneva conference (Weisel 2001, p. 158).
- 3.
Quoted in Boenke 1991, p. 88. This PhD thesis studies the early developments of German research in nuclear fusion in detail and can be found at https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2472138_4/component/file_2472409/content.
- 4.
It actually concerned a move of the institute from Göttingen to Munich.
- 5.
A curious arrangement to have a private person as a shareholder of a national institute. The initial idea was to have three private individuals as shareholders, namely Werner Heisenberg, Ludwig Biermann and Ernst Telschow (1889–1988). The latter had been an administrator of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft during the Nazi-time, having himself become a member of the Nazi Party in 1933, immediately after Hitler’s takeover of power.
- 6.
Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, 50 years of research for the energy of the future, https://www.ipp.mpg.de/17194/geschichte; Boenke 1991, p. 173 ff.
- 7.
The essential part of every invention is the work of chance, but most men never encounter this chance (Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 1997), translation by Maudemairie Clark and Brian Leiter).
- 8.
The International Workshop on H-mode Physics and Transport Barriers, the 17th of which took place in Shanghai in October 2019.
- 9.
Fifty years of research for energy of the future, https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4239000/50_years_en.pdf, p. 4.
- 10.
For more information the reader can visit the excellent and very transparent IPP website: (https://www.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/de/pr/forschung/asdex/index).
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- 13.
ENEA, Divertor Tokamak Test facility—Project Proposal, July 2015; Crisanti et al. 2017.
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Reinders, L.J. (2021). The Tokamak Stampede in Europe. In: The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64344-7_6
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