Z-Pinch: Powering Up Fusion in Huntsville

The road to fusion is a long slog, a fact that began to become apparent as early as the 1950s. It was then that the ZETA — Zero-Energy Toroidal (or Thermonuclear) Assembly — had pride of place as the fusion machine of the future, or so scientists working on the device in the UK thought. A design based on a confinement technique called Z-pinch (about which more in a moment), ZETA began operations in 1957 and began producing bursts of neutrons, thought to flag fusion reactions in an apparent sign that the UK had taken the lead over fusion efforts in the US.

This was major news in its day and it invigorated a world looking for newer, cheaper sources of power, but sadly, the results proved bogus, the neutrons being byproducts of instabilities in the system and not the result of fusion at all. Fusion has had public relations problems ever since, always the power source of the future and always just a decade or two away from realization. But of course, we learn from such errors, and refined pinch concepts — in which electric current induced into a plasma causes (via the Lorenz force) the plasma to pinch ...