EAST

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For the cardinal direction see East, for other uses see East (disambiguation)

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST, internal designation HT-7U) is an experimental superconducting tokamak magnetic fusion energy reactor in Hefei, the capital city of Anhui Province, in eastern China. The experiment is being conducted by the Hefei-based Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The project was proposed in 1996 and approved in 1998. According to a 2003 schedule,^[1] buildings and site facilities were to be constructed by 2003, and tokamak assembly to take place from 2003 through 2005.

In March 2006 Xinhua News reported that construction was complete. EAST is to conduct its initial test discharge sometime during August 2006. The first experiments of the reactor will be to create an ohmic plasma. Scientists will study the properties of this type of plasma for further research in the field of plasma physics.

The reactor is an improvement over China's first superconducting Tokamak device, dubbed HT-7, also built by the Institute of Plasma Physics in partnership with Russia in the early 1990s.

According to official reports, the project's budget is a relatively small CNY ¥300 million (approx. USD $37 million), some 1/15 to 1/20 the cost of a comparable reactor built in other countries.^[2]

According to an official state media report, EAST conducted its first successful test on September 28, 2006. The test reportedly used deuterium and tritium atoms and reached a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for nearly three seconds. However, according to NewScientist, these claims were "wildly exaggerated" by Chinese news sources, and what was actually achieved was "first plasma".^[3] The experimenters never claimed to have achieved fusion, and in fact it is never planned to use tritium, the necessary reactant, in EAST.

[edit] Physics objectives

China is a member of the ITER consortium, and EAST will be a testbed for technologies proposed for the ITER project.

EAST will test:

• Superconducting NbTi poloidal field magnets, making it the first tokamak with superconducting toroidal and poloidal magnets
• Non-inductive current drive
• Pulses of up to 1000 seconds with 0.5 MA plasma current
• Schemes for controlling plasma instabilities through real-time diagnostics
• Materials for divertors and Plasma Facing Components
• Operation with β_N = 2 and H₈₉ > 2

[edit] Tokamak parameters

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Plasma Physics - EAST
• People's Daily article
• Xinhua article Mar 1 2006 - Note that EAST is obviously not the "world's first experimental nuclear fusion device".
• Xinhua article Mar 24, 2006 Nuke fusion reactor completes test
• Mainichi Daily News article Jun 2, 2006