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.