ºÚÁÏÉçapp

Often the food analogies applied to tokamaks centre around doughnuts, due to the shape of magnetic field that confines the hot fusion plasma. But as one delves deeper into the complicated world of gyrokinetics, the simplistic doughnut transforms into a more complex banana orbit in a journey from the ideal to the real world.

The premise of the tokamak is to construct a doughnut shaped magnetic field and then the plasma particles will merrily spiral around it for ever. Enter an uncomfortable reality of geometry; as you can see in the main image above, the magnets are closer together in the centre of the torus (the hole of the doughnut) than they are around the outside. This means the magnetic field is not uniform: it is stronger in the inside part of the ring.

This means that the helical path the particle follows is not symmetrical. A tighter turn on the high field (inner) side of the line and looser on the outside leads to a drift either upwards or downwards (depending on the direction of rotation). This is the beginning of our banana orbit, as shown in the projected cross-section at the left-hand side of the figure. As an example, let's follow a particle on the inside of the banana halfway up, gradually creeping downwards to trace the banana's inner edge.

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Last Friday's report from the confirms the huge danger from our continued dependence on fossil fuel. But one simple thing can break this dependence. It needs to be cheaper to produce non-carbon than it is by digging up coal, gas or oil. Once this happens, most of the coal, gas and oil will automatically be left undisturbed in the ground.

To make non-carbon energy become competitive is a major scientific challenge, not unlike the challenge of developing the atom bomb or sending a man to the moon. Science rose to those challenges because a clear goal and timetable were set and enough public money was provided for the research. These programmes had high political profile and public visibility. They attracted many of the best minds of the age.

The issue of and energy is even more important and it needs the same treatment. In most countries, there is at present too little public spending on non-carbon energy research. Instead, we need a major international research effort, with a clear goal and a clear timetable.

Read the full article by David King and Richard Layard in .

Scientists at the UK's Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) have run final experiments on the MAST tokamak on Friday 27 September before starting a major overhaul of the device that will pave the way for a prototype fusion plant.

"It's a bittersweet moment for us because we are saying goodbye to the old machine but at the same time, we are already looking forward to the new one," said the CCFE spokesman Nick Holloway.

"At 4pm today, we will run the last plasmas and within minutes after that, engineers will move in to shut down the tokamak for the next 18 months. By Monday, the roof beams in the MAST machine area will have been taken off before the 25-tonne MAST vessel will be lifted on a big crane and moved to the assembly hall."

The £30m upgrade is set to make MAST (the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak), a cutting edge facility. It will increase its power and enable testing technologies that will improve the knowledge base needed for the construction of ºÚÁÏÉçapp, but also to test systems for the DEMO prototype fusion power plant.

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The European Domestic Agency (Fusion for Energy) has produced a new clip on ºÚÁÏÉçapp site works. See the two-minute video on ºÚÁÏÉçapp's critical networks .

​The sun pours out an amazing amount of energy. Only a small fraction of the sun's total output reaches us, yet it powers our entire ecosystem. All the plants and animals on planet earth rely on this warmth for light and food. Surprisingly, though, the sun is not a terribly good fusion reactor, for its size. In terms of power output per volume, JET at its best is over 700 times better, and ºÚÁÏÉçapp will be a staggering 2,150 times more efficient fusion reactor than the sun.

ºÚÁÏÉçapp's plasma volume will be 840 cubic metres, which with the target of 500 megawatt output power equates to nearly 600 kilowatts per cubic metre—the most efficient fusion reactor not only on Earth, but in the whole solar system!

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​At first, it's hard to know whether to take the company known as  (PSS) seriously. For one thing, the PSS offices, a few rooms in a nondescript building in nondescript Plainsboro, N.J., right above the Sugar and Sunshine Bakery, don't exactly suggest the imminent conquest of the final frontier. The company's ambitions, by contrast, certainly do — but those sound so crazy that you have to wonder if they're serious. This team of a half-dozen or so scientists and engineers is determined to send human beings to Mars, launch robotic probes to the outer solar system, send missions to Alpha Centauri and more, and do it all with rockets powered by nuclear fusion.

Read more .

​Welcome to the premiere issue of "Quest," the annual magazine of the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). We are pleased to provide this news of our strides in advancing research into fusion energy and plasma science—two topics of vital interest to the United States and the world.

Read Quest .

​Measuring the number of neutrons produced is one of the most basic yardsticks of success of a fusion experiment, yet it's surprisingly tricky to ensure your neutron detectors are calibrated correctly, says the leader of the team that has just finished calibrating JET's neutron diagnostic systems.

"The physics was only a part of the activity," says Project Leader, Dr Brian Syme. "Obtaining the neutron source, the safety issues and all the engineering developments associated with source handling were three quarters of the project!"

The process sounds simple enough — simply hold a radioactive source that produces a known number of neutrons at a set of known locations in the torus. From the detector counts you have an answer. However to get to that moment took the team three years of careful planning, including intensive neutronics calculations by colleagues in the Slovenian and Swedish associations.

Read more on the  website.