UAF Researcher Contributes to Fusion Energy

When the UAF Geophysical Institute studies the behavior of ionized gasses, the subject is typically the aurora borealis. For one researcher, though, the study of electrically charged fluids is contributing to advances in nuclear fusion energy.

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David Newman is a physicist specializing in plasma, a superheated state of matter where electrons tear away from their atoms. Plasmas in fusion energy research are millions of degrees, whereas auroras in the upper atmosphere might be no hotter than an oven.

Newman, a former chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics, has been working in nuclear fusion research for decades. He has been at UAF since 1998 and was previously at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The research has taken him overseas to work with colleagues in Spain, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, he has worked with researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and elsewhere.

His latest research, funded by the US Department of Energy, is in magnetic confinement fusion, one of two major pathways in the nuclear fusion field.

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved a breakthrough in December through the other of those two pathways: inertial confinement fusion. The world’s most energetic laser compressed a fuel pellet to fusion temperature, yielding more energy from nuclear reactions than ever before.

“What they achieved is a significant, incremental step,” Newman says. “There’s still a long way to go, probably several decades, before fusion energy can be created on a large and commercial scale.”