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Published online 5 March 2008 | Nature 452, 11 (2008) | doi:10.1038/452011a
Corrected online: 13 March 2008

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Magnets touted as fix for fusion reactor

ITER experiment faces up to effects of chaotic eruptions.

Physicists and engineers are poised to deliver their proposals for resolving a serious design flaw in the flagship international fusion reactor ITER, which is overdue to begin construction in Cadarache, France.

The €10-billion (US$15-billion) reactor involving seven international partners has been on the drawing board since the mid-1980s, but around five years ago it emerged that there was a worrying fault with the design.

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  • Eric mistakenly credits me with discovering that ELMs in ITER would be large enough to be a problem for the divertor. The credit for this discovery belongs to Alberto Loarte, Tony Leonard, and their colleagues, who discovered the ELM size scaling with edge plasma colllisionality. Please see, e.g. A. Loarte, M. Becoulet, G. Saidene, et al., Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion vol. 44, page 1815, 2002. I wasn't involved in this ELM size scaling work. Rick Moyer, UCSD

    • 05 Mar, 2008
    • Posted by: Richard Moyer
  • 20 GW times 1 microsecond = 20 kJ = heat of combustion of a tenth of a teaspoon of gasoline. What kind, exactly, of hand grenades is Mr. Evans thinking of?

    • 11 Mar, 2008
    • Posted by: Irl Smith
  • There is a mistake in the article. It should be 1 milisecond not 1 microsecond

    • 13 Mar, 2008
    • Posted by: Marcin Jakubowski