I will discuss the technical history of fusion, from the earliest astrophysical insights in 1920, through Oliphant, Rutherford and Harteck’s 1934 discovery of deuterium-deuterium (DD) fusion in Cambridge and subsequent Los Alamos breakthroughs on deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion, to today’s modern understanding. 

Our recently-uncovered technical history will be told, including E.O. Lawrence’s 1933 missed-opportunity to discover fusion (he was beaten to it by Oliphant), to the first-ever 1938 observation of DT fusion at Michigan University, a discovery that launched Oppenheimer and Teller’s interests in fusion technologies. This work has recently been published as a suite of 12 papers by the American Nuclear Society’s Fusion Science and Technology journal.

I will frame my presentation using the context of the Fusion History Workshop I organized at Los Alamos a few weeks ago, where we had attendance from numerous US Department of Energy laboratories and lab directors, universities, fusion start-up companies and technical leaders from ITER. Today’s fusion research challenges in plasma dynamics, nuclear science, materials, and tritium breeding will be described.

Dr Mark Chadwick is the Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation, Computation, & Theory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL Prior to his current assignment, he served as the interim Deputy Director for Science, Technology & Engineering at LANL and was the Chief Scientist and Chief Operating Officer for Weapons Physics.

Chadwick’s research work is in applied nuclear physics, and he has been leading cross-Laboratory scientific research strategy and integration in the nuclear arena. He also leads the national U.S. collaboration that oversees the development of Evaluated Neutron Data Files (ENDF, evaluation committee)—cross sections that are widely used in neutronics transport simulations. Chadwick is the lead author on books of collections of technical history papers on fission & the Manhattan Project, and on Fusion, published by the American Nuclear Society. 

Chadwick came to Los Alamos, from England, as a director’s postdoctoral fellow in 1990. He is a Los Alamos fellow, as well as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Nuclear Society. He earned a bachelor’s and PhD in physics from Oxford University.