OilPrice.com had an article Jan. 14, “Nuclear Fusion Has Gone from Pipe Dream to Possibility,” with ITER officials commenting on how important the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak’s (EAST) achievement of complete plasma stability is for the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) 35-nation project. In fact the smaller and lower-power EAST device at Hefei, China, with sufficient funding from the Chinese government, is really replacing ITER as an international tokamak project given all the latter’s construction delays. Scientists and engineers from Russia, Korea, India, Australia and Germany work with the EAST team. It is the first tokamak to use superconducting magnets for both the toroidal and poloidal magnetic fields holding the plasma—which is planned for ITER. (https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Nuclear-Fusion-Has-Gone-From-Pipe-Dream-To-Possibility.html )
EAST has confirmed in the past month the achievement (in 2022) of a “plasma super-I mode,” in which a stable plasma was maintained for nearly 20 minutes not only in the deep plasma, which has been done in other experiments, but at the edges of the plasma as well, preventing them from interacting with the walls. Engineers working on EAST describe the plasma as “calm” for long durations—it is clearly self-organizing. Furthermore no impurities accumulated within the plasma for the entire duration of the pulse. This was at about 70 million degrees Centigrade and with a power output of about 10 MW.
