The pioneers to the derivation of the rate of pycnonuclear fusion in one-component plasma (OCP) were Edwin Salpeter and David Van-Horn, with their article published in 1969. Their approach used a semiclassical method to solve the Schrödinger equation by using the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation, and Wigner-Seitz (WS) spheres. Their model is heavily simplified, and whilst it is primitive, is required to understand other approaches which largely extrapolated on the works of Salpeter & Van Horn. They employed the WS spheres to simplify the OCP into regions containing one ion each, with the ions situated on the vertices of a BCC crystal lattice. Then, using the WKB approximation, they resolved the effect of quantum tunnelling on the fusing nuclei. Extrapolating this to the entire lattice allowed them to arrive at their formula for the rate of pycnonuclear fusion:
where  is the density of the plasma,  is the mean molecular weight per electron (atomic nucleus),  is a constant equal to  and serves as a conversion factor from atomic mass units to grams, and  represents the thermal average of the pairwise reaction probability.
However, the big fault of the method proposed by Salpeter & Van-Horn is that they neglected the dynamic model of the lattice. This was improved upon by Schramm and Koonin in 1990. In their model, they found that the dynamic model cannot be neglected, but it is possible that the effects caused by the dynamicity can be cancelled out.