The world’s largest and most advanced tokamak fusion reactor has gone online as the EU/Japanese 370-tonne JT-60SA reactor was fired up for the first time during an inauguration ceremony in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan.

First conceived by Soviet scientists in the 1950s, tokamaks are toroidal reactors that are one of the leading contenders to become the first commercially viable fusion power plants. The name is a Russian acronym for Toroidal Chamber with Magnetic Coils and consists of a large doughnut-shaped chamber surrounded by magnetic coils that compress a plasma made of hydrogen isotopes until it reaches pressures and temperatures that are only found in the interior of the Sun to initiate fusion.

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In concept, it’s a simple machine and achieving fusion is relatively easy, but in practice it’s extremely difficult to build a reactor that can maintain a sustained fusion reaction that generates more power than is fed into it. The Japan Torus-60 (JT-60) project has been running since 1970 and the JT-60SA is that latest and biggest iteration.

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