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A British team has reported hitting a major milestone...heating a nuclear reactor to the "magic figure" of 100 million degrees Celsius...The British company achieved the milestone using a "spherical tokamak" called ST40...Due to its design, the ST40 is "compact" – less than three feet across – and reaches around 13 feet in height.

....the source of the sudden and puzzling collapse of heat that precedes disruptions that can damage doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion facilities. Researchers traced the collapse to the 3D disordering of the strong magnetic fields that bottle up the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels the reactions. The strong magnetic fields substitute in fusion facilities for the immense gravity that holds fusion reactions in place in celestial bodies. But when disordered by plasma instability in laboratory experiments the field lines allow the superhot plasma heat to rapidly escape confinement. Such million-degree heat crushes plasma particles together to release fusion energy and can...

Korea's 'artificial Sun' reactor has made headlines this week by officially sustaining plasma at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for more than 20 seconds. The team at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device reached an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit).According to New Scientist, the reaction was only stopped after 30 seconds because of hardware limitations. KSTAR uses magnetic fields to generate and stabilize ultra-hot plasma, with the ultimate aim of making nuclear fusion power a reality. You can see the footage below showing the reactor run over 24 seconds,...

“The old joke is that nuclear fusion is 30 years away and always will be,” quips Greg De Temmerman, managing director of Paris-based energy think tank Zenon Research. In fact, the joke has become so hackneyed over the decades it has been banned by editors at the Economist. “But more seriously, many things are happening right now in the field,” De Temmerman adds. Jokes aside, they are. Earlier this month, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor eclipsed previous records by sustaining a high plasma temperature for minutes (1,056 seconds). It reached two milestones: a one-million-ampere current and a 1,000-second...

Inside JET's torus, with superimposed plasma. (UKAEA) Late last century, the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, UK, churned out 22 megajoules of energy in what was, at the time, a record in fusion power. Now, experimental upgrades have brought the facility into line with the technology anticipated for a major international project, resulting in the production of nearly three times that amount of power. The advances are a major step forward for tokamak-based fusion, bringing us ever closer to a balance point where we can harvest a near endless stream of energy without the cost of polluting emissions or...

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Hefei in the east Chinese province of Anhui reports a new temperature record. At the end of last year, a plasma temperature of 70 million ° C could be maintained in the experimental nuclear fusion reactor for 1056 seconds, i.e. a good 17 minutes, reports the Institute for Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP). That is the longest time in which such a temperature could be kept constant. This creates a solid basis for further research into energy generation from nuclear fusion, writes the ASIPP. Its general director Prof. Yuntao...

Hundreds of times every month, a British scientist sitting in a high-tech control room in an industrial park in the Thames Valley near Didcot clicks his computer mouse. Each time he does so, a high-energy beam of subatomic particles is fired into a dark, swirling cloud of superheated hydrogen gas, known as a plasma, contained within a spherical steel tank about 6 ft in diameter. The plasma immediately sparks and glows and at that point has just become the hottest place in the solar system, hotter even than the core of the sun — that is to say, more than...

The world's largest magnet, a decade in the making, is ready to be shipped to France where it will form the centrepiece of a project to replicate the power of the sun. This will form a central part of ITER, a £17 billion ($23.95 billion) machine that creates fusion energy on Earth, built in France by 35 partner countries to find a 'true renewable power'. The hydrogen fusion system is a test to prove the technology can work and that power can be created and controlled to provide carbon-free safe electricity. While fusion power has been generated on Earth, it...

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research(KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees. To re-create fusion reactions that occur in the sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device like KSTAR to create a plasma state where ions and electrons are separated, and ions must be heated and maintained at high temperatures. So far, there have been other fusion devices that have briefly managed plasma at temperatures...

Beijing has successfully powered up its “artificial sun” nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, China’s People’s Daily reported on Friday. It’s designed to be a clean energy source, similar to the real Sun. Made to replicate the natural reactions that occur in the sun using hydrogen and deuterium gases as fuels, the HL-2M Tokamak reactor is China's largest and most advanced nuclear fusion experimental research device. It is located in southwestern Sichuan province and was completed late last year. The reactor is often called an "artificial sun" due to the enormous heat and power it produces. Men work inside...

Toroidal, or doughnut-shaped, tokamaks are prone to intense bursts of heat and particles, called edge localized modes (ELMs). These ELMs can damage the reactor walls and must be controlled to develop reliable fusion power. Fortunately, scientists have learned to tame these ELMs by applying spiraling rippled magnetic fields to the surface of the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. However, the taming of ELMs requires very specific conditions that limit the operational flexibility of tokamak reactors. Now, researchers at PPPL and GA have developed a model that... accurately reproduces the conditions for ELM suppression in the DIII-D National Fusion Facility that...

Physicists from the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo, Japan, have recorded the largest magnetic field ever generated indoors — a whopping 1,200 T (tesla)“Magnetic fields are one of the fundamental properties of a physical environment,” said lead author Dr. Daisuke Nakamura and colleagues.“They can be controlled with high precision and interact directly with electronic orbitals and spins; this makes them indispensable for research in areas of solid state physics such as magnetic materials, superconductors, semiconductors, strongly correlated electron materials, and other nanomaterials.”The researchers generated ultrahigh magnetic fields using the electromagnetic flux-compression (EMFC) technique.“We developed a...

Typically when referring to electrical current, an image of electrons moving through a metallic wire is conjured. Using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE), it is possible to create a current of pure spin (a quantum property of electrons related to its magnetic moment) in magnetic insulators. However, this work demonstrates that the SSE is not limited to magnetic insulators but also occurs in a class of materials known as paramagnets. Since magnetic moments within paramagnets do not interact with each other like in conventional ferromagnets, and thus do not hold their magnetization when an external magnetic field is removed, this...

A long-time puzzle in the effort to capture the power of fusion on Earth is how to lessen or eliminate a common instability that occurs in the plasma called edge localized modes (ELMs). Just as the sun releases enormous bursts of energy in the form of solar flares, so flare-like bursts of ELMs can slam into the walls of doughnut-shaped tokamaks that house fusion reactions, potentially damaging the walls of the reactor. To control these bursts, scientists disturb the plasma with small magnetic ripples called resonant magnetic perturbations (RMPs) that distort the smooth, doughnut shape of the plasma—releasing excess pressure...

Fusion energy has long been heralded as the power-supply of the future, but the sad joke is, it always will be. The experimental energy source is perennially 30 years away from being viable on a mass-scale. ... Conventional tokamaks are shaped like a donut, but recent design improvements have led to the creation of spherical tokamaks, which are shaped more like a cored apple and are able to generate magnetic fields to produce high-pressure plasma in a more energy- and cost-effective manner. The two most advanced spherical tokamaks on Earth are the UK’s soon-to-be-completed Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST) and...

A long-standing discrepancy between predictions and observed results in test reactors has been called "the great unsolved problem" in understanding the turbulence that leads to a loss of heat in fusion reactors. ... [I]t turns out that interactions between turbulence at the tiniest scale, that of electrons, and turbulence at a scale 60 times larger, that of ions, can account for the mysterious mismatch between theory and experimental results. ... The expectation by physicists for more than a decade had been that turbulence associated with ions (atoms with an electric charge) was so much larger than turbulence caused by electrons...that...

A cutaway view of the proposed ARC reactor. Thanks to powerful new magnet technology, the much smaller, less-expensive ARC reactor would deliver the same power output as a much larger reactor. Credit: the MIT ARC team ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It's an old joke that many fusion scientists have grown tired of hearing: Practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away—and always will be. But now, finally, the joke may no longer be true: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor—and it's one that might be realized...

But one group of UK researchers says that the key is to think smaller, and to mash together spherical reactors (a squashed-up version of regular-shaped reactors) and high temperature superconductors to accelerate the development of fusion energy. Their early prototype devices have a 1.2m diameter, and next up, they’re are aiming to build machines that are 3m high with a 2.5m diameter. ... “Instead of making bigger reactors, you go to a higher [magnetic] field that enables you to contain the plasma in an effective way.” ... “The idea is that the tokamak is like a magnetic bottle. On the...

ITER, the international fusion reactor being built in France, will stand 10 stories tall, weigh three times as much as the Eiffel Tower, and cost its seven international partners $18 billion or more. The result of decades of planning, ITER will not produce fusion energy until 2027 at the earliest. And it will be decades before an ITER-like plant pumps electricity into the grid. Surely there is a quicker and cheaper route to fusion energy. Fusion enthusiasts have a slew of schemes for achieving the starlike temperatures or crushing pressures needed to get hydrogen nuclei to come together in an...

Dr. Bussard and his team at Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation, after close to 20 years of hard work, have developed a revolutionary radiation-free fusion process that could change the world as we know it today. Fusion is the energy that powers everything in the universe. The sun's energy comes from fusion. Alternatively, fission is the process whereby heavy atoms, which are nearly unstable, are split into two radioactive atoms. Fusion, on the other hand, is when two light atoms merge. The ultimate fuels for fusion include hydrogen and other light atoms such as lithium, boron, and helium isotopes. Some of these...