JET congratulates Korea and the KSTAR team for achieving, on 8 November 2010, the first H-mode plasma. KSTAR is one of the latest and most sophisticated tokamaks to enter operation and, just like ITER, it is equipped with fully superconducting magnetic coils. This makes the machine capable of very long pulse operation to study the plasma physics of future steady-state fusion power plants.

The H-mode is the baseline mode of plasma operation on all of today’s major tokamaks. As the plasma auxiliary heating exceeds a certain threshold power the energy confinement of the plasma spontaneously doubles. This phenomenon was first discovered on ASDEX in 1982 and led to the rebuild of JET in 1993 to install a divertor, a necessary component for H-mode operation. With KSTAR now joining the fleet of H-mode tokamaks around the world one further step has been taken towards the realisation of fusion energy production!

The picture was taken by Martin Laxåback (JET) during the 23rd IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in October in Daejon, Republic of Korea.