Nuclear energy

Timothy Stoltzfus-Dueck, a theoretical physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), has won a DOE Early Career Research Award for exceptional scientists in the early stages of their careers. Stoltzfus-Dueck will use the five-year, approximately $500,000 per year award to develop and test models essential to the confinement of plasma, the hot, charged gas that must be tightly confined in doughnut-shaped devices to produce fusion reactions.

Graduate student Alexander Glasser, who arrived at the Program in Plasma Physics at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) after nearly a decade working on Wall Street, has won a highly competitive Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University. The fellowship provides full tuition and a stipend for the 2019-2020 academic year for students “displaying the highest scholarly excellence in graduate work.”

Scientists seeking to bring to Earth the fusion that powers the sun and stars must control the hot, charged plasma — the state of matter composed of free-floating electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions — that fuels fusion reactions. For scientists who confine the plasma in magnetic fields, a key task calls for mapping the shape of the fields, a process known as measuring the equilibrium, or stability, of the plasma. At the U.S.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has launched an ambitious new program to encourage private-pubic partnerships to speed the development on Earth of the fusion energy that powers the sun and most stars. The DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home of the US ITER Project Office, will manage the program, with PPPL physicist Ahmed Diallo serving as deputy director and Oak Ridge fusion engineer Dennis Youchison serving as director.