Fusion News: DOE Pulse- Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Tritium Shot Heard Around the World
On December 9th, 1993 The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory was able to achieve a world-record burst of more than 3 million watts o fusion energy shifting fusion into a reality. This achievement has also laid foundations for future fusion energy facilities, like the ITER. As reported by the DOE Pulse in the article, “Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Tritium Shot Heard Around the World:”
The historic shots capped years of intense preparation for tritium operations, which ran until TFTR was decommissioned in 1997 after setting more records and producing reams of new knowledge. “The journey to tritium was at least as exciting as the first experiments,” said former PPPL Director Ronald Davidson, who led the Laboratory during the tritium years. “It was an enormous technical undertaking and one of my greatest elements of pride in the PPPL staff was that the preparations were so good and so thorough that the tritium shots were successful early on in the D-T campaign.”
The preparations mobilized physicists, engineers and staffers throughout the Laboratory. “The absolute top priority was to demonstrate that one could carry out the tritium experiments safely,” said former Deputy Director Dale Meade. “Everyone focused on this mission as we went through a step-by-step construction and checkout of the tritium systems with rigorous adherence to procedures and strong oversight by DOE.”
