The image doesn’t show a mission control center for space exploration; instead, it’s the control room of the EAST experimental fusion reactor. Located at the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, EAST has set a new record for plasma confinement—1,066 seconds. The previous record of 403 seconds was also achieved there in 2023. This is a major breakthrough.

The key takeaway is that physicists have developed a way to sustain plasma for over 1,000 seconds. ITER, the world’s largest fusion reactor under construction in France, is expected to operate using similarly long pulses. Chinese experts are actively contributing to the ITER project, making this achievement a win for the global scientific community.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with updates from Chinese research centers, the information provided is incomplete. For example, there is no mention of the plasma’s temperature. In previous EAST experiments, it reached 120 million degrees Celsius, whereas ITER’s plasma is expected to exceed 150 million degrees (and up to 300 million degrees at its core).

Nevertheless, this is excellent news. Now we wait to see how Japan responds. Over a year ago, experiments began at JT-60SA, currently the largest tokamak in operation. It is designed to confine plasma at temperatures of up to 200 million degrees.

#Physics #Energy #Fusion #science

🚀 The first color footage of a FUSION REACTOR in action!

Tokamak Energy has just released incredible high-speed video — shot at 16,000 frames per second — showing the birth of plasma inside their fusion reactor.

In the clip, you can see a mesmerizing bright pink glow at the plasma’s edge — that’s light emitted as the superheated gas interacts with the reactor walls. The core itself remains invisible, simply because it’s millions of degrees hot — far beyond what any camera can capture.

This is what the future of clean, limitless energy looks like — contained in a magnetic field.

🎥 Full video here: watch the fusion magic

#fusion #energy #tokamak #plasma #science

☀️ AI Just Learned to Control Fusion Plasma Faster Than Humans Can React

Inside a fusion reactor, plasma can become unstable in just a few milliseconds.

That is a problem when even a highly focused human operator reacts on the scale of seconds.

Researchers from Princeton University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have now tested an AI control framework called PACMAN on the real DIII-D tokamak in California. The system continuously reads temperatures, densities and magnetic signals, runs multiple machine-learning models, resolves their commands and sends instructions back to the machine — with a complete control cycle typically taking about 20 milliseconds.

In one of five live experiments, PACMAN predicted a dangerous tearing-mode instability about 200 milliseconds before it appeared. Instead of trying to suppress the instability after it had already formed, the controller changed the plasma early enough to prevent it. In other tests, the system controlled plasma heating, density and rotation, detected energetic-particle waves, and simultaneously optimized all six of DIII-D’s microwave heating systems.

This does not mean AI has solved fusion. DIII-D is an experimental tokamak, not a commercial power plant, and researchers still set the goals and safety limits. The important step is that machine-learning models are now fast enough to participate directly in the millisecond-by-millisecond control of a real fusion plasma rather than merely analyzing experiments afterward.

Fusion has always had a control problem: the plasma changes faster than humans can think.

Apparently, that is exactly the sort of problem AI likes.

#Fusion #AI #Physics #Tokamak #Energy #MachineLearning #Science

https://www.pppl.gov/news/2026/pacman-ai-framework-controlling-fusion-systems-safely-makes-key-decisions-milliseconds