Fusion pioneer Fred Coensgen passes at age 88.(death of Frederic H. Coensgen )(Obituary)

Fusion Power Report, January, 2008

Frederic H. Coensgen passed away November 18, 2007 following a short illness. He was 88. He was a pioneer fusion research scientist, beginning his career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1949.

During the 1950s, he built two of the earliest magnetic mirror experiments, Toy Top I and II, which demonstrated the concept of magnetic compression for heating plasma, resulting in one of the earliest demonstrations of producing neutrons from a fusion experiment. These were documented in a classified report in 1955 and later reported at the early unclassified international conferences on fusion. He extended these results during the 1960s in the famous 2XII-B experiment at Livermore, in which fusion temperatures of over 200 million degrees were...

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