Energy Seminar Series, Fall 2022
Thursdays, 12:25 - 1:15 pm, 165 Olin Hall

Nuclear Power Now (Fission) and in the Near Future (Fusion)
David Hammer, Professor of Nuclear Engineering, Cornell University

The two versions of nuclear power, fission (splitting heavy nuclei) and fusion (making helium out of various combinations of light nuclei) are both options for producing “central station electric power” for thousands to millions of years without producing any greenhouse gases. The physics of fission is sufficiently simple that we have several hundred operating fission electric power reactors in the world now and more in the works. By contrast, fusion physics is sufficiently difficult that, after over 60 years of effort, only recently has substantial progress been made in both publicly and privately (venture-capitalist) funded approaches on the science and some aspects of the technology of fusion. After discussing why one is so easy and the other is so difficult, we will
report on recent advances in the development of fusion reactors and why a pilot fusion power reactor could be in operation in as little as 15 years thanks, in part, to the climate crises.

Biography:
Professor David Hammer has been a Cornell faculty member since 1977, first as a member of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Program and since 1995 as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Hammer worked at the Naval Research Laboratory (1969-1976) and was an Associate Professor at UCLA for a year before coming to Cornell. His research interests while at Cornell have been in pulsed-power-driven intense charged particle beams and high energy density plasmas. He was chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics in 2003-2004 and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, of the IEEE and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

For a complete list of seminar dates and speakers, please visit the Cornell Energy Systems Institute website.