Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Also known as PRINCETON PLASMA PHYSICS LABORATORY

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a US Department of Energy national laboratory for fusion and plasma science, managed by Princeton University on its Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, New Jersey. It grew out of Project Matterhorn, a classified programme that began studying controlled fusion in 1951 with the stellarator, a concept invented there, and took its present name in 1961. It later built a series of tokamaks, including the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR), which in 1993 became the first machine to use equal mixtures of deuterium and tritium and shut down in 1997. Its current main device, the spherical tokamak NSTX-U, was upgraded in 2015 but stopped in 2016 after a coil failure, and its restart has been repeatedly delayed; the IAEA survey lists it as under construction.