Disruption

A sudden loss of control of a tokamak plasma. Its stored heat is dumped onto the wall within milliseconds, then the plasma current collapses, inducing large forces in the vessel and magnets and sometimes producing beams of very fast 'runaway' electrons that can damage the wall. Disruptions are one of the main open engineering problems for tokamaks: a reactor-scale machine must predict and avoid them, or survive them, because neither the forces nor the heat loads can be allowed on a wall built to last for years. Stellarators do not need a current in the plasma to confine it, so they are largely free of this failure mode.

Vocabulary id

concept:disruption

Scheme

Concepts

Back to the glossary.