As we enter the last year of the millenium, fusion energy research has been underway for roughly half a century. In his book Project Sherwood (Addison Wesley, 1958), Amasa Bishop, first head of the U.S. fusion program, states "In the United States, interest in the possibility of controlled fusion dates back even prior to the end of World War II. From 1944 to 1946, frequent and lively discussions of the subject were held among scientists assembled at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory -- particularly E. Fermi, E. Teller, J.L. Tuck, S. Ulam, J. Wheeler and R.R. Wilson." The principles on which fusion research stands, plasma physics, had already begun to be developed. In 1934, W.H. Bennett published a paper on what was later to be called the "pinch effect" in a 1937 paper by L. Tonks. Pinches of various sorts were among the very first approaches to magnetic confinement fusion. Other concepts followed. Stellarators, invented by Lyman Spitzer, Jr., were under investigation at Princeton by early 1951. Herb York and Dick Post began the study of magnetic mirrors at the University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL) at Livermore, CA, around the same time. Related research using high power beams began at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, under the direction of Ed Shipley. A novel concept, called ASTRON, was pursued by N.C. Christofilos at UCRL.

The research in the 1950's was highly classified and, unbeknownst to U.S. researchers at the time, similar concepts were under investigation in the United Kingdom and the USSR. Experiments had begun in the U.K. by A.A. Ware and P.C.Thonemann in 1950. Early work in the USSR was under the direction of I.V. Kurchatov, L.A. Artsimovich and others. In 1957, British physicist J. D. Lawson published an historic paper in which he calculated the requirements of temperature, density and confinement time necessary for the production of net fusion power. These conditions, subsequently to be called the "Lawson Criterion," became the goal of fusion researchers and the measure of their progress.

After fusion was declassified by all countries in 1958, a spirit of friendly competition and widespread international collaboration became the hallmark of fusion research and endures to this day. Many other countries, most notably France, Germany and Japan, have joined the quest.

Progress has been slow but steady. A whole field of science, plasma physics, has been developed with many applications beyond fusion. The march up the Lawson scale has been systematic, with several experiments operating along the boundaries of the Lawson plot for "scientific breakeven," and there is a high degree of confidence in the scientific community that a net power producing device could now be constructed.

For a time in the 1970's it appeared that the U.S. and other governments were prepared to push forward expeditiously toward practical fusion power. The U.S. began to falter in its commitment in 1980 and the commitment of the U.S. government to fusion power development, as distinguished from the underlying scientific research, has continued to diminish. The latest evidence of this is the diminished participation of the U.S. in the international partnership to design and construct a fusion engineering test reactor called ITER (FPN98-30) and the continued threats to the U.S. fusion budget.

A characteristic of the U.S. fusion program over the decades has been that it is almost continuously being reviewed by various committees. Invariably the program gets high marks but rarely have the positive recommendations of the review committees been implemented. Instead, after a year or so of inaction, a new review is commissioned. The coming year will be no exception. At least four major reviews are presently underway or planned for 1999!

A committee of the Presidents Council of Advisors (PCAST) is meeting to make recommendations on "energy R&D opportunities and their associated budget and programmatic requirements within a balanced R&D portfolio that would make the U.S. role more responsive to the global energy-linked challenges of the next several decades, building on the work done in the previous PCAST Energy R&D Study." (FPN98-33).

The DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) is preparing a "report on the opportunities and the requirements of a fusion energy science program, including the technical requirements for fusion energy," and will then provide "recommendations for further redirection given projected flat budgets for fusion." (FPN98-31).

The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB) will "review the department's fusion-related technologies, program and priorities pertaining to the development of a fusion energy source." (FPN98-38).

Finally, the National Research Council will form a committee for the National Academy of Sciences to review the quality of the science performed as part of the U.S. fusion program.

And the "fusion community" will even review itself, in a two week soul searching excercise during July 1999 (FPN98-37).

During 1999, we will be covering the progress of these reviews in our Fusion Program Notes, as well as bringing other news to your attention as it unfolds. One might hope (one always hopes) that the new millenium will see the fulfillment of the fusion dream: practical fusion power.