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| The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor |
| The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) operated between December 1982 and April 1997. It was the largest magnetic fusion experiment in the United States and was the first such device in the world to perform extensive experiments with 50/50 mixtures of deuterium (D) and tritium (t) — the fuel mixture likely to be used in the commercial fusion power plants of the twenty-first century. TFTR studied the confinement and heating of D-T plasmas and the effects of alpha particles produced by the D-T fusion reactions. The confinement of D-T plasmas was observed to be better than that of plasmas comprised of deuterium ions only.
TFTR set a number of world records, including a plasma temperature of 510 million degrees centigrade. In November 1994, TFTR produced 10.7 million watts of controlled fusion power — a world record, surpassing its May 1994 level of 9.3 million watts. In 1995, TFTR developed the enhanced reversed shear regime with very low particle and ion thermal transport in the plasma core. Disassembly of TFTR was completed in 2002, and the former TFTR Test Cell at D-Site is now being used for the fabrication of components for the National Compact Stellarator Experiment. |
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