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  • Image of the week | More cladding and a new message

    As the October sun sets on the ITER worksite, the cladding of the neutral beam power buildings takes on a golden hue. One after the other, each of the scientifi [...]

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  • Cryodistribution | Cold boxes 20 years in the making

    Twenty years—that is how long it took to design, manufacture and deliver the cold valve boxes that regulate the flow of cryogens to the tokamak's vacuum system. [...]

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  • Open Doors Day | Face to face with ITER immensity

    In October 2011, when ITER organized its first 'Open Doors Day,' there was little to show and much to leave to the public's imagination: the Poloidal Field [...]

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  • Fusion | Turning neutrons into electricity

    How will the power generated by nuclear fusion reactions be converted into electricity? That is not a question that ITER has been designed to answer explicitly, [...]

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  • Fusion world | JET completes a storied 40-year run

    In its final deuterium-tritium experimental campaign, Europe's JET tokamak device demonstrated plasma scenarios that are expected on ITER and future fusion powe [...]

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Of Interest

See archived entries

Merry plasmas!

On 14 December, at 6:03 p.m., a flash of light illuminated the vacuum vessel of WEST, the rejuvenated Tore Supra tokamak designed to serve as a test bench for ITER.

Operational since 1988, the CEA-Euratom tokamak Tore Supra underwent a major transformation and became WEST (W Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a test bench for ITER. The machine produced its first plasma on 14 December. (Click to view larger version...)
Operational since 1988, the CEA-Euratom tokamak Tore Supra underwent a major transformation and became WEST (W Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a test bench for ITER. The machine produced its first plasma on 14 December.
This first plasma rewarded four years of hard work that involved stripping out the 30-year-old machine, adding magnetic coils to confine the originally circular plasma into a "D shape," and trading its carbon-carbon fibre (CFC) "limiter" for an ITER-like tungsten divertor.

Operators at the French Institute for Magnetic Fusion Research (IRFM) are now confident that they can move forward to the first experimental campaign, set to be launched in March 2017. The first phase of the campaign will explore heat load patterns and H mode transition; the second in October-December 2017 will focus on testing plasma-facing components under the high heat loads of ITER-grade plasmas.

On that very same day, Korea's National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) announced that the KSTAR tokamak had achieved a record 70-second H-mode plasma. (Click to view larger version...)
On that very same day, Korea's National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) announced that the KSTAR tokamak had achieved a record 70-second H-mode plasma.
On the very same day that the IRFM team was (discreetly) celebrating WEST's first plasma, another team, at the other end of the world, also had an achievement to announce: a record 70-second H-mode plasma had just been recorded by the Korean superconducting tokamak KSTAR.

One month earlier, in mid-November, the Chinese tokamak EAST had achieved a similar but slightly shorter 60-second steady-state high energy plasma.

Read more about WEST here.


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