Ядролық синтез бағдарламасының бастау тарихы ("Sherwood" жобасы)

Early US program in nuclear fusion
Project Sherwood was the codename for a United States program in controlled nuclear fusion during the period it was classified. After 1958, when fusion research was declassified around the world, the project was reorganized as a separate division within the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and lost its codename. Sherwood developed out of a number of ad hoc efforts dating back to about 1951. Primary among these was the stellarator program at Princeton University, itself code named Project Matterhorn. Since then the weapons labs had clamored to join the club, Los Alamos with its z pinch efforts, Livermore's magnetic mirror program, and later, Oak Ridge's fuel injector efforts. By 1953 the combined budgets were increasing into the million dollar range, demanding some sort of oversight at the AEC level. The name "Sherwood" was suggested by Paul McDaniel, Deputy Director of the AEC. He noted that funding for the wartime Hood Building was being dropped and moved to the new program, so they were "robbing Hood to pay Friar Tuck", a reference to the British physicist and fusion researcher James L. Tuck. The connection to Robin Hood and Friar Tuck gave the project its name. Lewis Strauss strongly supported keeping the program secret until pressure from the United Kingdom led to a declassification effort at the 2nd Atoms for Peace meeting in the fall of 1958. After this time a number of purely civilian organizations also formed to organize meetings on the topic, with the American Physical Society organizing meetings under their Division of Plasma Physics. These meetings have been carried on to this day and were renamed International Sherwood Fusion Theory Conference. The original Project Sherwood became simply the Controlled Thermonuclear Research program within the AEC and its follow on organizations.

Research centered on three plasma confinement designs; the stellarator headed by Lyman Spitzer at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the toroidal pinch or Perhapsatron led by James Tuck at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the magnetic mirror devices at the Livermore National Laboratory led by Richard F. Post. By June, 1954 a preliminary study had been completed for a full scale "Model D" stellarator that would be over 500 feet (152 m) long and produce 5,000 MW of electricity at a capital cost of $209 per kilowatt. However, each concept encountered unanticipated problems, in the form of plasma instabilities that prevented the requisite temperatures and pressures from being achieved, and it eventually became clear that sustained hydrogen fusion would not be developed quickly. Strauss left AEC in 1958 and his successor did not share Strauss' enthusiasm for fusion research. Consequently, Project Sherwood was relegated from a crash program to one that concentrated on basic research.

In the early 1950s, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was composed of a small group of scientists that were mostly experienced with research in ion source technology. However, research from Project Sherwood was a growing area of interest, and the researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory wanted to participate in the discovery of controlled fusion. They studied areas of controlled fusion such as the rate of plasma diffusion in a magnetic field and the charge exchange process. However, their work with ion source was still a large part of their research.

Although there was already a main project (magnetic mirror) at the University of California, scientist W. R. Baker began research into the pinch effect at UCRL, Berkeley in 1952. Two years later, Stirling Colgate began research on shock heating at UCRL, Livermore.

There was another small group of scientists at Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts that had become involved in research of the pinch effect. Although their work was not officially part of the Atomic Energy Commission, some of their personnel attended the Sherwood conferences.

In 1954, there was a program started at New York University called the Division of Research. It was a small program that included personnel from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.