Subscribe options

Select your newsletters:

Please enter your email address:

@

Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the ITER Organization publication(s) that you have requested. ITER Organization will not transfer your email address or other personal data to any other party or use it for commercial purposes.

If you change your mind, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe option at the bottom of an email you've received from ITER Organization.

For more information, see our Privacy policy.

News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Portfolio | Sector repair has started

    Built up against vacuum vessel sector #7, the scaffolding reaches almost 20 metres in height and masks the massive component. Streaks of blinding light, filtere [...]

    Read more

  • Fusion world | Public/private consortium is building the DTT tokamak

    The Divertor Test Tokamak in Italy is creating a new model for engagement with industry in fusion research. ITER helped to pave the way. The Divertor Test Tokam [...]

    Read more

  • Image of the week | An architectural paradox

    There is something deliberately paradoxical in the architectural treatment of the ITER buildings. On the one hand, the alternation between the mirror-like stai [...]

    Read more

  • Former French Prime Minister | A fan then and now

    For Jean-Pierre Raffarin, former Prime Minister of France (2002-2005) who visited ITER on Friday 15 March, touring the ITER installation with ITER Director-Gene [...]

    Read more

  • CARE at ITER | New project values launched

    Collaboration, Accountability, Respect and Excellence drive the future of fusion for a diverse staff. When Pietro Barabaschi joined as ITER Director-General to [...]

    Read more

Of Interest

See archived entries

Adding fuel to MAST's fire

Firing tiny deuterium pellets into the tokamak furnace is one of the most effective ways of getting fuel into the plasma, enabling fusion reactions and the unlocking of energy. (Click to view larger version...)
Firing tiny deuterium pellets into the tokamak furnace is one of the most effective ways of getting fuel into the plasma, enabling fusion reactions and the unlocking of energy.
They call it the "snowball in hell"—a bullet of frozen deuterium fuel heading at high speed into the furnace-like plasma of the MAST fusion device at Culham. A team at MAST is investigating this method of fuelling plasmas and how it will work in the future on the giant international experiment ITER.

Firing these tiny pellets is one of the most effective ways of getting fuel into the plasma, enabling fusion reactions and the unlocking of energy. This will become increasingly important as future fusion devices become bigger and plasmas get hotter to reach ignition, the point at which the plasma heats itself without external input—crucial for power-producing reactors. To achieve ignition, the density of the plasma core must be raised and sustained by fuelling it.

Luca Garzotti, one of the CCFE physicists studying pellet injection on MAST, explains the process: "Just like a car engine, a tokamak needs to be fuelled—the fuel goes in to the plasma and there is an exhaust to get rid of unwanted gases. In fusion, helium comes out of the exhaust via a system called the divertor. I'm looking at how we can put the fuel (deuterium and tritium) in at the start.

Read more on Culham Centre for Fusion Energy website.


return to the latest published articles