#tokamak

Tokamak Energy released a color video of a lithium powder drop experiment in their spherical tokamak. I have no affiliation with TE, but in my opinion this is rad as hell. The lithium is dropped in from a hopper in the top right, where it first glows orange as it heats up and then green as it ionizes. Thank you TE for putting this out there!

The hydrogen plasma is bright magenta. The edges look much brighter than the core, because the core is so hot that it's not glowing in visible wavelengths anymore.

This is what you're looking at. The ST-40 tokamak out of its cryostat, and a view through that midplane port on the right looking at the central column.

Nuclear fusion promises a virtually limitless, sustainable energy source via processes similar to those powering the Sun, provided some rather tricky and fundamental physics problems can be figured out first. There are a variety of methods currently being investigated for squeezing energy out of atoms, each with its pros and cons. New research suggests we may soon have a way of overcoming a major obstacle in processes that use donut-shaped tunnels known as tokamaks. A previously theorized barrier to tokamak fusion known as the Greenwald limit has now been smashed by a factor of ten, thanks to the efforts of a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin.

Final Confinement Test for UK's JET Tokamak Reactor

On October 3rd, 2023, Joint European Torus (1983) - the largest & longest running magnetic fusion reactor - broke its previous world record with a new highest plasma shot achieved in fusion reactors.

Although the test had no positive yield in fuel output, the 40 year old Tokamak reactor went out with a bang of 69.26 megajoules, in 5.2 seconds, with only 0.21 milligrams of deuterium-tritium fuel mixture. Shortly after, in 2024, JET was retired & stripped of parts for ITER.