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Successful careers are fueled by relationships and cannot thrive in isolation, yet this summer professional networking may not be easy. Conversations with National Laboratories is a series of webinars with prominent researchers, who will talk and answer your questions about their career paths and research at the National Labs. Video recordings of webinars can be found here.
Our next conversation is with Dr. Nathaniel Ferraro, Research Physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).
Date/time: Wednesday, August 19 at 12pm ET
Location: Zoom meeting, Webinar registration
Speaker: Nathaniel Ferraro, PPPL
Accelerating Fusion Energy Research at PPPL and Around the World
Abstract: Fusion energy holds the promise of essentially unlimited environmentally sustainable power. The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has been at the forefront of fusion energy research since the 1960s, over which time tremendous progress has been made toward the goal of developing fusion energy as a power source. Recent developments in the U.S. and around the world, including the construction of major new facilities and the availability of high performance computing, have led to a renewed push for fusion energy and new investment from private industry. In developing fusion energy as a commercially attractive power source, major scientific and technological challenges remain, not only in understanding and controlling the stability and confinement properties of fusion plasmas, but also in understanding how to design a reliable, maintainable reactor compatible with the heat and neutron fluxes present in a fusion environment. The expansion of the field of fusion energy research to encompass all aspects of fusion reactor design will bring many new opportunities for research across a broad range of fields.