In the past several years, steady progress has been made worldwide in the development of high-speed hydrogen pellet injectors for fueling magnetically confined plasmas. Several fueling systems based on the conventional pneumatic and centrifuge acceleration concepts have been put into practice on a wide variety of toroidal plasma confinement devices. Long-pulse fueling has been demonstrated in the parameter range 0.8–1.3 km/s, for pellets up to 6 mm in diameter, and at delivery rates up to 40 Hz. Conventional systems have demonstrated the technology to speeds approaching 2 km/s, and several more exotic accelerator concepts are under development to meet the more demanding requirements of the next generation of reactor-grade plasmas. These include a gas gun that can operate in tritium, the two-stage light gas gun, electrothermal guns, electromagnetic rail guns, and an electron-beam-driven thruster. Although these devices are in various stages of development, velocities of 3.8 km/s have already been achieved with two-stage light gas guns, and the prospects for attaining 5 km/s in the near future appear good.
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Stanley L. Milora (1989) studied this question.