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February 2025
Latest News
WEST claims latest plasma confinement record
The French magnetic confinement fusion tokamak known as WEST maintained a plasma in February for more than 22 minutes—1,337 seconds, to be precise—and “smashed” the previous record plasma duration for a tokamak with a 25 percent improvement, according to the CEA, which operates the machine. The previous 1,006-second record was set by China’s EAST just a few weeks prior. Records are made to be broken, but this rapid progress illustrates a collective, global increase in plasma confinement expertise, aided by tungsten in key components.
R. T. Santoro, J. Barish
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 59 | Number 2 | February 1976 | Pages 189-194
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE76-A15689
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The cross-section sensitivity of the fusion probability has been calculated for various conditions of incident deuteron energy and plasma electron temperature. The fusion probability is most sensitive to the D-T cross section at the higher energies (≳50 keV), and, based on the reported errors in the cross section, the errors in the calculated fusion probabilities should be ≲10%. The cross-section sensitivities of the D-T reaction rate in a D-T plasma and the T-T reaction rate in a tritium plasma have also been calculated for various assumed values of the plasma ion temperature.
