Registration for the 16th ITER International School in Bengaluru, India, on "Tokamaks as Fusion Reactors" has been extended through 3 September 2026. CLICK HERE FOR ALL INFORMATION.
WEST has concluded its three-month C13 campaign with a milestone: producing its first H-mode plasmas with Edge Localized Modes (ELMs).
H-mode is the high-confinement regime that ITER will use to achieve several of its research goals, and it is characterized by ELMs—bursts of energy and particles released at the plasma edge that deposit extreme thermal loads on plasma-facing components.
Achieving this regime on WEST provides a unique opportunity to investigate plasma-wall interactions closer to foreseen ITER conditions and opens the route to one of the pillars of the WEST scientific program: testing the ITER divertor components against transient heat fluxes during long time periods and in a similar tungsten environment.
Beyond plasma performance, the C13 campaign yielded operational insights like the minimum wall boronization needed to restart after a venting, the use of ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) for wall conditioning between pulses, and the use of ICRH for boronization.
These results will contribute to the preparation of ITER-relevant plasma scenarios, the development of predictive models, and the validation of the ITER divertor’s performance.
To create fusion, you need a very different world to the one we live in. It needs to be six orders of magnitude hotter and six orders of…
Six orders of magnitude
To create fusion, you need a very different world to the one we live in. It needs to be six orders of magnitude hotter and six orders of magnitude less dense — and the result is six orders of magnitude more energy than most everyday processes. The EFDA web site has the whole story here...
