WEST tokamak run by the CEA © L. Godart/CEA
Feb. 18, 2025 — French analysis group CEA reported that on 12 February, the CEA’s WEST tokamak maintained a nuclear fusion plasma for greater than 22 minutes, a 25 p.c enchancment over the earlier document.
“This leap ahead demonstrates how our information of plasmas and technological management of them over longer durations is changing into extra mature, and provides hope that fusion plasmas may be stabilised for larger quantities of time in a machine resembling the large ITER tokamak, a machine that confines a plasma utilizing magnetic fields, in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France.
The WEST tokamak is run from the CEA Cadarache facility in southern France and is without doubt one of the EUROfusion consortium’s medium measurement tokamak services. The earlier document time was achieved by EAST, in China, just a few weeks beforehand.
In its announcement, CEA mentioned reaching durations resembling these is a vital milestone for machines like Iter, which might want to preserve fusion plasmas for a number of minutes. The tip aim is to manage the plasma, which is of course unstable, whereas making certain that every one plasma-facing parts are capable of stand up to its radiation with out malfunctioning or polluting it.
That is what CEA researchers intend to realize and what explains the present document. Over the approaching months, the WEST crew will double down on its efforts to realize very lengthy plasma durations – as much as a number of hours mixed – but additionally to warmth the plasma to even larger temperatures with a view to approaching the circumstances anticipated in fusion plasmas, in response to CEA.
CEA mentioned the WEST facility welcomes researchers from world wide, who make use of its key traits that enable long-duration plasmas, significantly its superconducting coils and actively cooled parts. WEST is one side of a global motion comprising different main experiments by which CEA researchers are concerned, resembling JET, the Joint European Torus tokamak in the UK (closed in late 2023), which holds the document for fusion power, JT-60SA in Japan, EAST in China, and KSTAR in South Korea, to not point out the flagship machine that’s ITER.
“WEST has achieved a brand new key technological milestone by sustaining hydrogen plasma for greater than twenty minutes by means of the injection of two MW of heating energy. Experiments will proceed with elevated energy. This glorious end result permits each WEST and the French group to paved the way for the long run use of ITER.”, remark Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, Director of Elementary Analysis on the CEA.
Nuclear fusion is a expertise with the final word aim of controlling naturally unstable plasma. It makes use of even fewer assets and fewer gasoline than fission, which was already very concentrated, and doesn’t produce long-lived radioactive waste.
Of the varied doable strategies for producing power, essentially the most superior is magnetic confinement fusion , the place plasma is held in a torus by an intense magnetic discipline and heated till the hydrogen nuclei fuse. Confinement fusion has been proven by JET to provide fusion energy of 15 MW for a number of seconds.
France, residence to each WEST and ITER, is well-placed to deal with the primary prototype nuclear fusion reactor. Nuclear fusion is a supply of power that exploits nuclear reactions, with many doable complementary facets with nuclear fission power and related strategies regarding neutrons and matter, that are nicely understood.
However, given the infrastructure wanted to provide this power on a big scale, it’s unlikely that fusion expertise will make a major contribution to attaining net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. For this, a number of technological sticking factors must be overcome, and the financial feasibility of this type of power manufacturing should nonetheless be demonstrated.
France has achieved a major milestone in nuclear fusion expertise by setting a brand new world document on the CEA Cadarache middle. The WEST tokamak sustained a plasma response for over 22 minutes, surpassing China’s earlier document by 25%. This breakthrough, which concerned sustaining a fusion plasma at temperatures of tens of tens of millions of levels, marks an important development in the direction of the aim of steady, long-duration fusion reactions. The achievement is well known globally as a step nearer to realizing fusion power, doubtlessly providing a limitless and clear power supply.
France has simply sustained a fusion response for greater than 22 minutes, breaking China’s document (from few weeks in the past) of 18 minutes. The CEA’s WEST machine was capable of preserve a plasma for 1,337 seconds.
There’s a revolution taking place proper now. This breakthrough is huge — and the world must know. We’re on the point of almost free, limitless power, the very basis that drives technological and scientific development.
This leap ahead demonstrates how our information of plasmas and technological management of them over longer durations is changing into extra mature.
