Mirror Fusion Test Facility
former experimental magnetic confinement fusion device in California, USA
The Mirror Fusion Test Facility, or MFTF, was an experimental magnetic confinement fusion device built using the tandem magnetic mirror design. It was, by far, the largest, most powerful and most expensive mirror machine ever constructed. Due to budget cuts, it was mothballed the day after its construction was complete, and sat unused for a year before being formally cancelled. $372 million were spent on the system during its lifetime.
MFTF was the ultimate development of a series of machines at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that trace their history back to the early 1950s. Over the years one problem after another had been addressed, leading to designs using "baseball" and "yin-yang" mirrors. By the late 1960s, it appeared possible to build stable mirrors. However, these changes had also lowered their economic performance, to the point where they appeared unattractive as power generators.
In 1968, the Soviets demonstrated their tokamak systems were outperforming all others by a factor of at least ten. The path to practical fusion appeared open, and in the US, in the mid-1970s, Robert Hirsch began plans to produce a prototype power plant.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mirror Fusion Test Facility” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.