Editing Magnetic mirror (section)

===TMX-U fails, MFTF mothballed===
[[File:The Mirror Fusion Test Facility During Construction.jpg|thumb|alt=The MFTF was a 372 million dollar Livermore project that was mothballed|The MFTF was a $372 million Livermore project that was mothballed]]
TMX-U began experiments in July 1982, by which time parts of [[Boeing 747]]-sized MFTF were being installed at Building 431.{{sfn|Heppenheimer|1984|p=201}} However, as they attempted to raise the density of the plasma to values that would be needed for MFTF, they found that plasma escaping from the central tank overwhelmed the thermal barriers. There was no obvious reason to believe the same would not occur on the MFTF. If the rates seen in TMX-U were typical, there was no way MFTF would come remotely close to its ''Q'' goals.{{sfn|Booth|1987|p=155}}

Construction on MFTF, already budgeted, continued and the system was declared officially complete on 21 February 1986, at a final price of $372 million. While thanking the team for their contributions in building the system, the new director of the DOE, John Clarke, also announced that there would be no funding to run it.{{sfn|Booth|1987|p=152}} Clarke later lamented that the decision to cancel the project was very difficult, "It would have been so much easier if I had a technical failure to point to."{{sfn|Booth|1987|p=155}}

It sat unused for a year on the chance that operational funding would be provided. It never was. The machine was scrapped in 1987. The DOE also cut funding for most other mirror programs.{{sfn|Booth|1987|p=152}}