The Fusion Podcast -

For 44 years, Dr. Sam Cohen has worked as a physicist at Princeton University. He currently serves as director of the Plasma Science and Technology program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Since 1998, Dr. Cohen has been performing research on plasma devices known as Field-Reversed Configurations (FRCs), studying their potential as power plants and rocket engines. In November 2013, his small group announced that they had held an FRC stable for 300 milliseconds — a world record, by a large margin. Our interview covers a transitional period in his career, from his time spent as a manager on the U.S. ITER effort to his personal experiences rubbing shoulders with physics luminaries to the beautiful physics and practical aspects of field-reversed configurations. Dr. Cohen offers advice on how the U.S. government could accelerate progress in fusion by re-invigorating research into small, clean fusion reactors, an activity now proceeding almost exclusively with venture capital support.

Professor Thomas J. Dolan is author of “Fusion Research” (1982) and editor of “Magnetic Fusion Technology” (Springer, 2013). He served as head of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, Physics Section. Dr. Dolan has worked at universities (Missouri, Illinois); national labs (LLNL, LANL, ORNL, INL); in industry (Phillips Petroleum); and in Canada, Taiwan, Russia, Austria, China, Japan, India, and Korea. His new book is “Molten Salt Reactors and Thorium Energy” (Elsevier Press, 2017). In our interview, we talk about the history of fusion research in America.

In this episode, we continue with Dr. Dean's story. This show opens with some man-on-the-street interviews; testing the general public's knowledge of fusion. We talk about the field's problems communicating with the public and how it affects lobbying for fusion in Washington. We then move on to talking about private efforts in fusion.

Since co-founding the Fusion Power Associates in 1979, Dr. Stephen O Dean has been a voice for fusion research in Washington, D.C. In this episode, we go through Dr. Dean's career and weave it into the broader story of fusion in America.

The first episode introduces you to this podcast. We start by exploring fusion's significance to mankind. We move on to the discovery of fusion and the first fusion reaction, at Los Alamos National Labs. I give my personal story and my start in the field as a graduate student working on inertial confinement fusion. Next, we go through the mechanics of ICF, the concept of ignition and the NIF machine.

Dr. Terry received a degree in physics from the MIT, followed by the MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins, in 1968, 1975, and 1978 respectively. In 2007, he retired after 22 years as a plasma physicist at the Naval Research Labs in Washington, D.C. Previously, he worked at Jaycor, which was a fusion development company and served as a principal investigator for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Currently, he consults on several fusion topics, including the dense plasma focus.

In 2011, Rezwan Razani founded the Fusion Energy League, which educates the public and policymakers on the value of fusion research. The group is a nonprofit which advocates for a broad set of fusion approaches, concepts and research.

From 2009 to 2011, Dr. Klein served as CEO and co-founder of FP Generation. This company raised $3 million in venture capital to develop a fusion concept, in Boston. In our interview, we discuss his time developing the concept, raising funding, running the company and the experience gained when the effort failed. Dr. Klein received a PhD in plasma physics from Columbia University in 2006 and worked on the Joint European Torus, as a post-doc at MIT, until 2009.

Dr. Stephen O Dean co-founded the Fusion Power Associates in 1979, with Drs. Nick Krall and Alvin Trivelpiece. Dr. Dean has led this organization since its' founding. The FPA has been providing coordination and communication among leading fusion research institutions for the past four decades. Dr. Dean holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Maryland and is the author of "Search for the Ultimate Energy Source." In our interview we discuss the history of fusion research stretching back into the 50's.