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Lab's Flickr and Facebook pages feature historical magnetic fusion photos
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1969. The Baseball II superconducting magnet at LLNL was designed to generate a maximum magnetic field of 75,000 Gauss (and a central field strength of 20 kG) for containment of high temperature hydrogen plasmas. The Baseball magnets were part of ALICE (Adiabatic Low-Energy Injection and Capture Experiment) and follow-on fusion experiments. By comparison the earth's magnetic field is approximately 0.5 Gauss, or 150,000 times less than maximum field achieved here.
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In this photo from 1978, technician Sam Espinoza is shown checking the alignment of one of the mirror magnets as construction of the $11.4 million Tandem Mirror Experiment (TMX) construction neared completion.
Long before the ITER magnetic fusion project broke ground in France, LLNL was experimenting with devices with esoteric names including Q-cumber, TableTop, 2XIIB, Alice and Baseball.
In 1980, the world's largest superconducting magnet was built for the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF) to confine plasma. At $372 million, it became the Lab's most expensive construction during the '80s.
The Lab's Flickr photo sharing site has posted 30 historical photos of the early magnetic fusion projects, scanned in high resolution by the LLNL Archives Department.
The photos are also available on the Lab's Facebook page.
