The journal Nuclear Fusion gave its 2015 Nuclear Fusion Award to Rob Goldston, a Princeton University astrophysical sciences professor and a fusion researcher.
The award will be presented at the upcoming 2016 Fusion Energy Conference in Kyoto, Japan. With the engraved award, Goldston also will receive a
certificate and $2,500. The award recognizes a study published in 2012 that he
prepared while serving as director of the Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory (PPPL).
“It is a great pleasure to win this scientific award for a paper written three
years after I stepped down from my leadership post at PPPL,” Goldston said. “It
is fun to be back in the fray, working with top-quality scientists, helping to
make sense of very important, and very carefully measured, data.”
In this study, Goldston presented a model that can estimate the width of
the hot plasma layers expelled in fusion reactors. The
publication’s editorial board said this study served as an important development in nuclear fusion research and praised the study’s role in generating additional
research in this area.
This model and the information it can provide are expected to benefit the operators of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), currently under construction in France, in demonstrating the potential of fusion power. The study should be helpful to the reactor's operators, who will need to find a way to minimize this plasma to protect important components.
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