James L. Tuck - Fusion Power

Fusion Power

At Los Alamos, Tuck took up research on fusion power, which he had learned about during his stay in the UK. Tuck suggested that the Los Alamos group pursue a pinch program similar to the one being carried out in the UK. This was only months after Lyman Spitzer had started work on his stellarator design. Both were invited to Washington to present their ideas, where Spitzer won $50,000 in funding from the Atomic Energy Commission. Returning to Los Alamos, he arranged for a similar $50,000 from the lab's discretionary budget and started a pinch project under the name Perhapsatron.

Like all pinch systems, Perhapsatron failed due to instabilities in the plasma. Theoretical work by Edward Teller and others suggested ways out of the instability problem, either pinching so quickly that fusion took place before the instabilities formed, or by using "cusped" magnetic fields. The former was developed as the Columbus while the later became the picket fence reactor design, both led by Tuck's teams.

He remained at Los Alamos until his retirement in 1972. Earlier in 1972 he had published a review in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of the book Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Frontiers of Public and Private Science by Solly Zuckerman.

After his retirement Tuck became a prominent public supporter of research into thermonuclear fusion for power generation. He also became interested in the phenomenon of ball lightning, probably because of the connection between plasmas and their role in fusion power schemes, and in 1980 he appeared in the Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World episode 'Clarke's Cabinet of Curiosities' where he described his experiments at Los Alamos, carried out during lunch breaks, to create ball lightning using a large storage battery of the type then used in submarines.