Donato Palumbo (16 July 1921 – 9 February 2011) was an Italian physicist best known as the leader of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) fusion research program from its formation in 1958 to his retirement in 1986. He was a key force in the development of the tokamak during the 1970s and 80s, contributing several papers on plasma confinement in these devices and leading the JET fusion reactor program, which , retains the record for the closest approach to breakeven, the ratio between the produced fusion power and the power used to heat it. He is referred to as the founding father of the European fusion program.
Early life
Donato was born in Trapani to father Giuseppe, a doctor, and mother Rosalia Di Lorenzo. In 1939 he won first place in a placement contest for Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in physics, graduating in 1944. He became an assistant professor at the University of Palermo in physics, spectroscopy and electrochemistry. He became a full professor in general physics in 1954 and higher physics in 1958. He also taught courses in economics and medicine. In 1946 he spent a year at the Sorbonne and the Institut Henri Poincaré, and about six months at the University of Bristol in 1957. During this period he published about 25 papers in various journals.
Euratom fusion program
In 1958, Palumbo visited the international Atoms for Peace show in Geneva where the topic of nuclear fusion was first widely declassified and the research efforts in the US, UK and USSR were published. Only a year earlier, Italian commissioner Enrico Medi of the recently formed European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) asked Palumbo to move to Brussels to lead the fusion part of the EURATOM research program. It seemed fission energy might be outdated in the near future and he formed plans for a fusion power effort.
Palumbo took a unique approach to the problem, one that is widely credited with its success. The fission program within Euratom was formed along classical lines with the creation of new joint labs run directly by Euratom, that later were integrated in the Joint Research Center. For the fusion program, Palumbo came up with the concept of contracts of association signed between EURATOM and national research institutions of the Member States. Existing national labs would compete for development projects. Successful bids would be funded at 25%, leaving the rest to the lab's existing national funding. This meant the labs remained in charge of their research directions, freely choosing to bid on or ignore any project that came from Brussels.
The first formal agreement under this framework was made with the French Commissariat à l'énergie atomique in 1959, followed by the Italian National Committee for Nuclear Research in 1960 and the German Max Planck Institut für Plasma Physik in 1961. They were eventually joined by the Dutch and Belgian labs, and then, in 1973, by the UK and Denmark in spite of neither being a member of the European Community at the time. By the time he retired, there were 13 nations in the group. This led in 1999 to the creation of the European Fusion Development Agreement.
By the late 1960s, after 15 years of effort around the world, fusion appeared simply to not work. The problem was that all machines suffered from problems where the fuel would leak out of the reactors faster that it took for the fusion reactions to occur, meaning there was no way they could produce net power. The entire field entered what was known as "the doldrums", and the national labs saw their budgets being repeatedly cut as the possibility of success seemed increasingly remote.
Switch to tokamaks
Soviet scientists reported in 1968 the superiority of the toroidal configuration for magnetic plasma confinement. The publication of the results from the T-3 and TM-3 tokamaks reenergized the fusion field. This design, a simple but important variation on previously studied concepts, demonstrated confinement times at least fifty times better than what was predicted by Bohm diffusion that stymied earlier approaches.