The inauguration of the world's most powerful fusion machine brings the dream of clean, safe and abundant power closer.
In the eastern Japanese city of Naka stands a six-story-high tower that is far from being an ordinary building.
The device inside the cylindrical steel structure is called a tokamak. It's designed to hold swirling superheated gases called plasmas at up to 200 million degrees Celsius—more than 10 times hotter than the sun's core.
Located northeast of Tokyo, the tokamak represents the next milestone in a decades-long international quest to make fusion energy a reality and reflects leading roles played by the EU and Japan.
The Naka structure, known as JT-60SA, is the outcome of an EU-Japan agreement from 2007 to develop fusion energy. It's the world's most powerful tokamak and was inaugurated in December 2023 after almost a decade of construction.
"JT-60SA coming into operation is a very important milestone," said Professor Ambrogio Fasoli, an Italian physics expert who leads a consortium that received EU funding to advance the prospects for commercial energy from fusion.
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