Magnetically confined plasmas articles from across Nature Portfolio

Confining plasma and managing disruptions in tokamak devices is a challenge. Here the authors demonstrate a method predicting and possibly preventing disruptions and macroscopic instabilities in tokamak plasma using data from JET.

Nuclear fusion is one of the avenues pursued to generate carbon-free energy for an increasingly demanding world, but technical instrumental concerns remain, which will impact the realisation and performance of future fusion power plants. The authors employ a combined experimental, computational and theoretical approach, to elucidate the mechanism by which turbulence spreading sets the divertor (a component that extracts heat and ash produced by the fusion reaction) heat load width in fusion tokamak, and demonstrate common trends in the upstream edge turbulence intensity flux, the pressure perturbation skewness, and the turbulence mixing length, which together determine the downstream heat load width.

Strong diffusion limit is the maximum rate of electron loss into the atmosphere from Earth’s radiation belts. Here, the authors show scaling up chorus wave power to the strong diffusion limit causes rapid acceleration of electrons, sufficient to outweigh the losses due to strong diffusion.

Artificial intelligence control is used to avoid the emergence of disruptive tearing instabilities in the magnetically confined fusion plasma in the DIII-D tokamak reactor.

Plasma created in laboratory are useful to understand the properties of atmospheric and space plasma. Here the authors report a laboratory plasma experiment in a dipole magnetic field to show the excitation of chirping whistler waves, i.e. chorus emission.

Pietro Barabaschi, Director General of ITER, calls for measures and incentives to carefully document the entire research process, including dead ends and failures, instead of reporting just the successful final results.

A paper in Nature shows how reinforcement learning can solve the problem of optimizing the magnetic field in a tokamak to create a variety of plasma configurations, including ones that haven’t been achieved before.

Science diplomacy has become an important dimension of international relations. Here’s a take on the past, present and future of fusion science diplomacy and the role such big collaborative endeavours play in shaping the future of this field in the international political sphere.

The assembly of the more than a million single parts of the ITER tokamak requires large-scale three-dimensional precision metrology. John Villanueva Jr gives us insights into the complexity of this project.

The First Plasma discharge in the ITER tokamak is expected for 2025 with deuterium–tritium plasma operation ten years later. We spoke with ITER’s Director-General, Bernard Bigot, and Tim Luce, head of ITER’s Science & Operations Department, about the current status of the project and potential future directions in fusion research.