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The Start of Global Cooperations



A look inside the plasma vessel of the Joint European Torus (JET). JET is located in Culham, GB.


In the Soviet Union, significant fusion research was also being undertaken. At first all these national projects were shrouded in secrecy, but with the temporary thaw in the Cold War created in 1956 by the visit of the Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Bulganin to the UK, the first attempts at global co-operation were created. The Russians brought their leading fusion expert academician I.V. Kurchatov to give a lecture "The Possibility of Producing Thermonuclear Reactions in a Gas Discharge". This described Soviet work in the field and the UK shared its ZETA experience.

Fusion research also started elsewhere (e.g. France and Germany). International co-operation began under the normal scientific exchange of information as countries declassified fusion research, and an Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva in 1958 sealed the start of the process. In the UK this led directly to the setting up of a custom-built laboratory at Culham that would subsequently become the home of the Joint European Torus (JET).

Almost 10 years later (in 1968) results from the Russians Tamm and Sakharov using a new type of magnetic confinement device called a tokamak caused a major stir. Their experiment ran at temperatures ten times higher (10 million degrees centigrade) than anywhere else in the world with excellent confinement results. The success of the Russians, confirmed by visiting UK scientists in 1969, led to the construction of many tokamak experiments and its position as the dominant technique for fusion research today.