Alcator C-Mod graduate students in control room

The Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) is a university research center for the study of plasmas, fusion science and technology. It was originally founded in 1976 as the Plasma Fusion Center (PFC) at the request and with the collaboration of the

U.S. Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United States. ...

. The original grant was for construction and operation of a tokamak reactor Alcator A, the first in a series of small, high-field tokamaks, followed by Alcator C (1978) and Alcator C-Mod (1993). MIT's most recent tokamak, Alcator C-Mod, ran from 1993 to 2016. In 2016, the project pressure reached 2.05 atmospheres—a 15 percent jump over the previous record of 1.77 atmospheres with a plasma temperature of 35 million degrees C, sustaining fusion for 2 seconds, yielding 600 trillion fusion reactions. The run involved a 5.7 tesla magnetic field. It reached this milestone on its final day of operation. In 2018, the PSFC began developing a conceptual design for the SPARC tokamak in collaboration with

Commonwealth Fusion Systems Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is an American company founded in 2018 aiming to build a compact fusion power plant based on the ARC tokamak power plant concept. The company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a spin-off of the Massa ...

. SPARC intends to use new

YBCO Yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) is a family of crystalline chemical compounds that display high-temperature superconductivity; it includes the first material ever discovered to become superconducting above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen ...

superconducting magnet A superconducting magnet is an electromagnet made from coils of superconducting wire. They must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures during operation. In its superconducting state the wire has no electrical resistance and therefore can conduct mu ...

s in order to achieve net fusion energy in a compact device.

References

External links

PSFC homepageNuclear Science and Engineering homepage
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New Record for Fusion (MIT News) New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created. New or NEW may refer to: Music * New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz Albums and EPs * ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013 * ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...

Alcator C-Mod pressure record: FAQ (PSFC News)
Plasma Science and Fusion Center Plasma physics Plasma physics facilities {{plasma-stub