#96 Kitty Hawk Moment Achieved in Fusion

A Memory From the New Energy Times Fusion Archives

On Dec. 9 1993, fusion researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory achieved a “Kitty Hawk moment,” analogous to the Wright brother’s first flight. Their reactor produced an output of 3 million Watts of “fusion power.”

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the “world-record burst of more than 3 million watts of fusion energy was enough to momentarily light some 3,000 homes.” (Archive  copy)

The DOE neglected to mention that the reactor consumed 950 million Watts of electricity, equivalent to the average consumption of a city of a half-million residents.