Comment by adfm
5 days ago
From the announcement, "1,337 seconds: that was how long WEST, a tokamak run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France and one of the EUROfusion consortium medium size Tokamak facilities, was able to maintain a plasma for on 12 February. This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously."
1,337-second burn.
Lots of leet scientists there, in all seriousness. CEA is my alma mater, though I worked on quantum computing, not fusion.
how many more seconds did they push it to hit 133t xD
Considering it's fusion we're talking about, 1,337 seconds is about as arbitrary as 1,000 seconds. On a 24-hour clock, 13:37 is 1:37pm. 137 is the fine-structure constant or α. Who knows what they're actually capable of. A second more at this point would be pointless.