Carl Weggel

Carl Weggel is a Board Advisor specializing in Tokamak and Fusion Generator Design, with over 50 years of experience advocating the compact, ultra-high-field-tokamak route to commercial fusion energy. His extensive expertise encompasses building and analyzing magnets, magnetic fields, and magnetic shielding for various applications, including fusion energy, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), shielded rooms, and particle beamlines. His notable accomplishment includes saving Harvard University $53 million in magnetic shielding for the Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering Building.

Carl served as a Senior Magnet Design Engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1961 to 1966, where he worked on magnets for research, NMR, controlled thermonuclear fusion, and magnetic propulsion. This work involved magnetic fields, Lorentz forces, stresses, strains (deflections), and thermal analysis. Between 1973 and 1975, he designed the 14-tesla Toroidal Field (TF) magnet for MIT's record-setting tokamak, Alcator "C". Alcator “C” is renowned for being the world's highest-field tokamak and one of the most powerful superconductors. Carl's design, analysis, and optimization of Alcator “C”'s liquid-nitrogen-cooled, toroidal-field coils significantly reduced the cost to one-tenth that of competitors.

From 1980 to 1984, Carl worked at INESCO, Inc. in La Jolla, CA, as the program manager of the magnet design department, leading a team of 15 expert engineers. He designed a toroidal-field coil with a central field of 16 teslas and a maximum field of 22 teslas. He also provided stress analysis and gantry deflections for Loma Linda, CA's first proton therapy system, examining the gantry's stresses and deflections. Carl's experience extends to working as a Mechanical Engineer at Science Applications International Corporation, Inc. (SAIC) from 1988 to 1989 and Intermagnetics General Corporation for one year.

At GE Healthcare in Florence South, NC, from 1991 to 1992, Carl held the position of Senior Magnet Designer for MRI and electromagnetics, where he designed a super-open MRI magnet using niobium-tin wire and developed computer software for MRI machines. For more than 38 years, Carl has worked as a freelance magnet analyst in Andover, MA, focusing on magnet design, magnet analysis, magnet optimization, fringe field reduction, cost minimization, materials selection, and computer calculus. From 2018 to 2020, he collaborated with his brother Bob at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS)—an MIT "spin-out"—designing the magnets for CFS's SPARC (Soonest-Possible, Affordable, Robust, Compact) tokamak.

Carl Weggel holds an A.B. degree in Physics and Applied Math from Harvard University and a master's degree from Tufts University Graduate School of Engineering. With his vast experience and expertise in magnet and fusion generator design, Carl is well-positioned to guide the development of advanced fusion energy solutions for a sustainable future.

Listen to Carl's Interview on Apple Podcast