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(PhysOrg.com) -- The superconducting cables designed for the ITER fusion reactor (cost: 16 billion euros = $21.2 billion) are unable to withstand the planned forty to sixty thousand charge cycles. Barring a solution, the troubled mega-experiment will suffer still more delays and cost overruns.

A team of scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has found that increasing the amount of lithium coating in the wall of an experimental fusion reactor greatly improves the ability of experimentalists to contain the hot, ionized gas known as plasma. Adding more lithium also enhances certain plasma properties aiding the reaction, the researchers found.

A fusion reactor operates best when the hot plasma inside it consists only of fusion fuel (hydrogen's heavy isotopes, deuterium and tritium), much as a car runs best with a clean engine. But fusion fuel reactions at the heart of magnetic fusion reactors also create leftovers—helium "ash." The buildup of this helium ash and other impurities can cool the hot plasma and reduce fusion power

(PhysOrg.com) -- Heated to extreme temperatures of up to 150 million degrees Celsius, the plasma in ITER's giant experimental fusion reactor will be fed a fuel of frozen pellets of deuterium-tritium, fired into the tokamak vacuum vessel by pellet injectors. Testing of the most recent pellet injection design technology developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and US ITER is under way this fall at the DIII-D research tokamak in San Diego, operated by General Atomics for the Department of Energy through the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new tool developed by nuclear engineers at Purdue University will be hitched to an experimental fusion reactor at Princeton University to learn precisely what happens when extremely hot plasmas touch and interact with the inner surface of the reactor.

How much light the sun emits affects the Earth's weather and climate.

University of California-Irvine researcher Zhihong Lin is using the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study fusion reactions, which produce helium from hydrogen and release energy in the process, in hopes of igniting ITER, an experimental fusion reactor being built in southern France.