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It’s exciting news for UK fusion as it highlights a smooth pathway for regulating and stimulating a sector that aims to provide low cost, limitless and clean energy to the world. This is especially important in the run-up to COP26.
We welcome the government’s endorsement of the Regulatory Horizons Council’s recommendations for fusion regulation to be led by the Environment Agency and the Health & Safety Executive.

On a pu visiter le chantier d'Iter : une des machines les plus complexe jamais réalisée, où la précision cotoie le gigantisme, la cryogénie les tempréatures extrèmes., Pendant les 3 jours ou on a pu voir une bonne partie du chantier : la fusion est capricieuse à obtenir, difficile à maintenir mais le prix en vaut largement la chandelle !

The analysis of turbulent flows is a significant area in fusion plasma physics. Current theoretical models quantify the degree of turbulence based on the evolution of certain plasma density structures, called blobs. In this work we track the shape and the position of these blobs in high frequency video data obtained from Gas Puff Imaging (GPI) diagnostics, by training a mask R-CNN model on synthetic data and testing on both synthetic and real data. As a result, our model effectively tracks blob structures on both synthetic and real experimental GPI data, showing its prospect as a powerful tool to estimate blob statistics linked with edge turbulence of the tokamak plasma.

The prospect of commercially viable, fusion-power plants based on the spherical tokamak has moved closer after a major experiment in the UK released its first results. Using a novel kind of exhaust, researchers at the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST-U) at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire were able to cut the waste heat load on the reactor walls ten-fold. If the results can be extrapolated to working fusion reactors, then exhaust material and other components would not need to be regularly changed – making such reactors more cost effective by allowing them to operational for longer.

Tokamak devices use strong magnetic fields to confine and to shape the plasma that contains the fuel that achieves fusion. The shape of the plasma affects the ease or difficulty of achieving a viable fusion power source. In a conventional tokamak, the cross-section of the plasma is shaped like the capital letter D. When the straight part of the D faces the "donut hole" side of the donut-shaped tokamak, this shape is called positive triangularity. When the plasma cross-section is in a backwards D shape and the curved part of the D faces the "donut hole" side, then this shape is called negative triangularity. New research shows that negative triangularity reduces how much the plasma interacts with the plasma-facing material surfaces of the tokamak. This finding points to critical benefits for achieving nuclear fusion power.

Depending on whom you ask, fusion power is either already here (but no one will purchase my sekrit design!), never going to happen (so stop wasting money!), or a difficult problem that might be a partial solution to an even more difficult problem. The last, being the view of scientists who actually work in the field, is often lost in all the noise.

The Oxford firm’s ST-40 fusion prototype is claimed to be the most advanced compact spherical compact tokamak in the world and is planned to reach plasma temperatures above 100m degrees Celsius in 2021. To achieve these temperatures – and deliver energy gain from fusion – scientists use high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets to control the plasma.

STEP is a UKAEA programme that will demonstrate the ability to generate net electricity from fusion. It will also determine how the plant will be maintained through its operational life and prove the potential for the plant to produce its own fuel.
The first phase of the programme is to produce a concept design by 2024. It will be a spherical tokamak, connected to the National Grid and producing net energy, although it is not expected to be a commercially operating plant at this stage.

International investors have consistently backed Tokamak Energy, which has raised over £100m of private investment, making the firm one of only four private fusion companies globally – and the only one in the UK – to have received such a high level of funding.
During her visit to Tokamak Energy, the Secretary of State viewed the ST-40 fusion device and visited the development facility for high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. Anne-Marie Trevelyan also learned more about the company’s plans to commercialise fusion by combining compact spherical tokamaks with HTS magnets.

Lucia used the evaporation technique to coat a piece of metal with lithium, and then used MAPP to expose the metal to plasma within LTX. As he expected, Lucia observed lithium oxide, which forms when lithium reacts with residual oxygen in LTX’s vacuum chamber. He was surprised, however, to find that the compound was just as capable of absorbing deuterium as pure lithium was.

Impurities in the plasmas in fusion tokamaks can reduce performance. These impurities are created by interactions between the hot plasma and the metal tokamak walls. These walls are often armored with tungsten. This material resists heat, but degrades over time, releasing impurities into the plasma. Simulations predict how these impurities behave, but they are difficult to measure directly because many impurities only emit weak levels of radiation. The experiment detailed here used a collector probe to sample the plasma. It determined that detrimental impurities accumulate in the region just outside the plasma edge only when the tokamak magnetic fields rotate around the donut-shaped tokamak in a counter-clockwise direction. This is the opposite direction that the plasma current moves. Clockwise rotation causes fast flows that remove the impurities.

Ce vendredi 4 décembre 2020, la Chine a activé avec succès son tokamak, cette chambre de confinement magnétique permettant de générer une chaleur de 150 millions de degré, préalable au développement de la technologie de la fusion nucléaire contrôlée. Les données et expériences générées par ce « soleil artificiel » vont s’intégrer dans la participation chinoise au projet international Iter.

La mise en service progressive du tokamak japonais JT60-SA vient de passer un jalon important le 26 novembre: les 18 bobines toroïdales supraconductrices de la machine ont atteint leur température de fonctionnement nominal à 4.5 Kelvin (-269°C).

Un tokamak sphérique est un dispositif de confinement magnétique de plasma de type tokamak permettant d'obtenir des réactions de fusions de nucléons (fusion nucléaire). Un tokamak sphérique a un solénoïde central beaucoup plus fin qu'un tokamak classique. Une telle installation serait susceptible d'être utilisée pour produire de l'électricité.