Return to home page for tokamak.info

Tokamak World Records

2016 saw a collection of new world records claimed by EAST, KSTAR and Alcator C-Mod. The exact claims from East and KSTAR were a little difficult to fathom, but I have tried to summarise what they have claimed (to the best of my knowledge. Feel free to suggest how it might be reworded for full clarity. Here is a useful page courtesy of FuseNet which gives some more detail: Shattering fusion records during the last months of 2016

This page is not primarily intended for the non-technical audience! Nor is it likely to be complete or undisputed.  World records include:

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-china-artificial-sun-world-steady-state.html#jCp.
Record Perhaps held by . . .
Highest toroidal field Alcator C-MOD, USA
Smallest conventional tokamak to demonstrate all the characteristics of H-mode (Probably) COMPASS-D, UK
This record might be considered controversial. Which characteristics count?.
Note that START achieved H-mode, but is a spherical tokamak.
Also note that the Canadian T de V is the smallest machine to have contributed H-modes to the International Multi-Tokamak Database and that this has significantly affected extrapolations to ITER size machines. Machines as small as STOR-M have also demonstrated some of the features of H-mode, but perhaps not all of them.
Largest major radius (5m) ET, USA
Greatest increase in pulse duration by using AC operation (35 ms to 220 ms) ISTTOK, Portugal
Greatest fusion power output (16.1 MW) JET, EU (in divertor configuration)
Greatest fusion energy yield (59 MJ in a 5 seond pulse, 2021) JET, EU (in divertor configuration)
Largest plasma volume JET, EU in its original limiter configuration
Highest plasma current (7 MA) JET, EU in limiter configuration
Largest DC flywheel generator JFT-2M, Japan
Record NBI power injection JT-60U, Japan
Highest Ion Temperature (5.2 x 108°C) JT-60U, Japan
Highest fusion triple product JT-60U, Japan
Longest confinement time JT-60U, Japan
Highest plasma pressure, 2 bar Alcator C-Mod, USA (2016)
Highest proportion of boot-strap current (100% achieved in 2006) TCV, Switzerland
First fully non-plasma current driven by ECCD alone (210kA in 2000) TCV, Switzerland
Most desirable second-hand tokamak (?) (Iran offered $90 million!) T de V, Canada
Longest pulse duration at over 100kA plasma current (5 hours 16 minutes) TRIAM-1M, Japan
Claimed longest pulse duration (29 hours) - it turns out that there is some dispute about whether this was truly a tokamak plasma or more-or-less a glow discharge. There have been claims that the plasma current was not measured. It is hard to say that it truly beats the performance of TRIAM-1M in a way that is yet useful. ST25HTS, UK
Longest pulse duration at 'high temperature' (1056 seconds reaching 127 million degrees fahrenheit in 2021) EAST, China
Longest H-mode - EAST and KSTAR continue to compete strongly for this record. In 2017 KSTAR claimed 70 seconds, and shortly afterwards EAST claimed a stable 101.2-second steady-state high confinement plasma. This record seems likely not to last for long.

EAST, China (2016)

KSTAR, S Korea (later 2016)
Highest injected/extracted energy (1.1GJ in a pulse) Tore Supra, France
Highest beta achieved in a tokamak (Approaching 100%) PEGASUS, USA
Largest number of TF coils (56 coils) Ormak, USA
Smallest number of TF coils (4 coils?) Alcator A, USA
Largest tokamak under construction ITER

If you would like to suggest another world record to add to this table, please contact me with evidence to support your claim.

 


Validated by HTML Validator (based on Tidy)

HTML: nick@tokamak.info