Polarized plasmas may prove useful for fusion reactors Available to Purchase

A casual cocktail‐party inquiry by Maurice Goldhaber (Brookhaven) has set in motion the detailed examination of a quite novel approach to fusion in magnetic‐confinement reactors. Last winter Goldhaber asked Harold Furth, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, whether he had ever considered polarizing the nuclear spins in a magnetically confined reactor plasma. The answer was no, basically because naive considerations lead one to expect that such a polarized hot plasma would much too quickly become thermally depolarized.