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Breaking into Fusion

[2024-07-18]

fusion st_dev

First thing first, here's the Next Step Fusion blog and website.

Organizations list on the Fusion Energy Base.

§ Reports

§ MOOCs & Courses

§ EPFL Plasma Physics on edX

A solid intro into plasma physics theory and applications from EPFL.

At the moment of writing the audit of those courses and lecture notes is available for free, but the full admission with graded assignments is rather costly (I wonder if that's the case for a majority of courses on edX?).

§ International Atomic Energy Agency

§ Videos

§ Bloomberg Originals about fusion landscape

§ The need for fusion - with the UK Atomic Energy Authority

A story told by three experts in turns: a climatologist, a physicist and an engineer.

§ Alexander Kachkin. "How does a fusion reactor work?" (Ru)

§ Books

§ Papers & Articles

§ 2024

  • Will We Ever Get Fusion Power? A concise historical essay + possible future scenarios. Very neat.

    In the U.S., interest in fusion was spurred by an announcement from the Argentinian dictator Juan Peron that his country had successfully achieved nuclear fusion in 1951. This was quickly shown to be false, and within a matter of months the physicist behind the work, Ronald Richter, had been jailed for misleading the president.

    ^a friend of mine from Argentina responded that this story is (in)famous, and that "ironically, it actually spurned the creation of the Balseiro institute, which is now one of the top centers on nuclear physics"

    ITER began in 1979 as INTOR, the International Tokamak Reactor, an international collaboration between Japan, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and the European energy organization Euratom. The INTOR program resulted in several studies and reactor designs, but no actual plans to build a reactor. Further progress came in 1985, after Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was convinced by Evgeny Velikhov that a fusion collaboration could help defuse Cold War tensions, and after a series of discussions, INTOR was reconstituted as ITER in 1986.


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