Since 1951, the Prince­ton Plasma Physics Lab­o­ra­tory (PPPL) has con­ducted research aimed at devel­op­ing con­trolled nuclear fusion as an energy alter­na­tive to fos­sil fuels. Founded by Lyman Spitzer *38, the PPPL is a joint project of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity and the US Depart­ment of Energy, located on Princeton’s James For­re­stal Cam­pus. This 1989 pub­lic­ity film high­lights the PPPL’s his­tory, projects, and progress toward its mis­sion of devel­op­ing sus­tain­able nuclear fusion.

The film’s focus is the PPPL’s main exper­i­ment in the 1980s and 1990s, the Toka­mak Fusion Test Reac­tor (TFTR). This device used mag­netic fields to con­tain a plasma made of hydro­gen iso­topes which were heated to a tem­per­a­ture so high that their nuclei fuse together into a new mol­e­cule, gen­er­at­ing energy as a byprod­uct. TFTR’s goal was to develop a process of gen­er­at­ing more energy through the fusion than the amount of elec­tric­ity required to power the reac­tor con­tain­ing the plasma. By 1989, TFTR’s suc­cesses included achiev­ing a then record-temperature of  200 mil­lion degrees Cel­sius and con­firm­ing exis­tence of a so-called “boot­strap cur­rent” within plasmas.

The film also men­tions other PPPL exper­i­ments includ­ing soft x-ray lasers, plasma etch­ing of elec­tron­ics, and stud­ies of the solar system’s mag­netic fields. Pro­posed exper­i­ments were also described, such as a replace­ment for the TFTR, a new reac­tor called the Com­pact Igni­tion Toka­mak (CIT).

While the PPPL has pro­duced sev­eral sim­i­lar pro­mo­tional films, the mes­sage of opti­mism in this 1989 promo belies a year of dif­fi­cul­ties for the Lab­o­ra­tory, as it faced chal­lenges includ­ing the per­ceived threat of cold fusion, lay­offs of 95 peo­ple due to a $12 mil­lion bud­get cut, and the res­ig­na­tion of direc­tor Howard P. Furth.

Despite these dif­fi­cul­ties, the PPPL’s efforts to gen­er­ate nuclear fusion con­tin­ued. The Toka­mak Fusion Test Reac­tor would go on to gen­er­ate record amounts of man-made fusion power (10.7 mil­lion watts), pro­duce record tem­per­a­tures of 510 mil­lion degrees, and dis­cover new meth­ods of plasma con­fine­ment. While TFTR was retired in 1997, the PPPL con­tin­ues to research nuclear fusion with a new reac­tor, the National Spher­i­cal Torus Exper­i­ment (NSTX).

–John P. DeLooper

This VHS video is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (Item no. 1491)