A tough year just got tougher for US fusion researchers. The country’s flagship experimental fusion reactor has broken down, less than a year after completing a four-year, US$94-million upgrade. Now officials at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey are investigating whether problems encountered during fabrication of a key component caused the reactor to fail.
Lab officials say that the machine could be offline for up to a year. Making matters worse, one of the other two fusion reactors funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) is scheduled to shut down on 30 September. That leaves US scientists with just one major facility to conduct fusion experiments, at the defence contractor General Atomics in San Diego, California.
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