![]() To reach fusion-relevant temperatures, the ITER tokamak will heat plasmas using three methods.The Sun has been burning hydrogen for 4.5 billion years and is about halfway through its life cycle. The Sun is a burning plasma that has reached “ignition,” meaning the Sun’s plasma temperature is maintained solely by energy released from fusion.The ITER facility will be capable of accessing the burning plasma regime and aims to produce 500 MW of fusion power for 400 seconds with self-heating power levels that exceed external heating power by a factor of two. DOE also supports construction of the international ITER project through the FES program and the U.S. The USBPO is a national organization of FES-funded scientists and engineers involved in researching the properties of magnetically confined burning fusion plasmas. DOE research activities are managed under the Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program within the DOE Office of Science. The Department of Energy provides significant support to research and development relating to burning plasmas. DOE Office of Science: Contributions to Burning Plasma Science These issues are all critical to ITER’s broader goal of using self-heating plasma reactions to become the first fusion energy device that produces more power than it consumes, a massive step toward commercial fusion power production. Fusion scientists and engineers at ITER will investigate the physics, engineering, and technologies associated with self-heating plasma. The ITER tokamak will be the first magnetic confinement experiment to explore these burning plasma issues. Many new scientific challenges await scientists at the frontiers of burning plasma science including understanding and controlling a strongly coupled, self-organized plasma management of heat and particles that reach plasma-facing surfaces demonstration of fuel breeding technology and the physics of energetic particles. A plasma enters what scientists call the burning plasma regime when the self-heating power exceeds any external heating. The high temperatures needed to sustain fusion reactions are maintained by the “self-heating” process in which energy from the fusion reaction heats the thermal plasma ions via particle collisions. In the Sun, those fusion reactions involve hydrogen ions. A burning plasma is one in which most of the plasma heating comes from fusion reactions involving thermal plasma ions. Plasma, one of the four fundamental states of matter, consists of a gas of ions and free electrons. Sustained, ongoing fusion reactions like those in our Sun rely on burning plasmas. ![]()
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