The SPARC tokamak project, currently in engineering design, aims to achieve breakeven and burning plasma conditions in a compact device, thanks to new developments in high-temperature superconductor technology. With a magnetic field of 12.2 T on axis and 8.7 MA of plasma current, SPARC is predicted to produce 140 MW of fusion power with a plasma gain of Q ≈ 11, providing ample margin with respect to its mission of Q > 2. All tokamak systems are being designed to produce this landmark plasma discharge, thus enabling the study of burning plasma physics and tokamak operations in reactor relevant conditions to pave the way for the design and construction of a compact, high-field fusion power plant. Construction of SPARC is planned to begin by mid-2021.

The ITER design, and future reactor designs, depend on divertor ‘detachment,’ whether partial, pronounced or complete, to limit heat flux to plasma-facing components and to limit surface erosion due to sputtering. It would be valuable to have a measure of the difficulty of achieving detachment as a function of machine parameters, such as input power, magnetic field, major radius, etc. Frequently the parallel heat flux, estimated typically as proportional to P _sep / R or P _sep B / R , is used as a proxy for this difficulty. Here we argue that impurity cooling is dependent on the upstream density, which itself must be limited by a Greenwald-like scaling. Taking this into account self-consistently, we find the impurity fraction required for detachment scales dominantly as power divided by poloidal magnetic field. The absence of any explicit scaling with machine size is concerning, as P _sep surely must increase greatly for an economic fusion system, while increases in the poloidal field strength are limited by coil technology and plasma physics. This result should be challenged by comparison with 2D divertor codes and with measurements on existing experiments. Nonetheless, it suggests that higher magnetic field, stronger shaping, double-null operation, ‘advanced’ divertor configurations, as well as alternate means to handle heat flux such as metallic liquid and/or vapor targets merit greater attention.

Vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy is used on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak to study the physics of impurity transport and provide feedback on impurity levels to assist experimental operations. Sputtering from C-Mod’s all metal $\left(\text{Mo}+\text{W}\right)$ plasma facing components and ion cyclotron range of frequency antenna and vessel structures (sources for Ti, Fe, Cu, and Ni), the use of boronization for plasma surface conditioning and Ar, Ne, or ${\text{N}}_{\mathbf{2}}$ gas seeding combine to provide a wealth of spectroscopic data from low-Z to high-Z. Recently, a laser blow-off impurity injector has been added, employing ${\text{CaF}}_2$ to study core and edge impurity transport. One of the primary tools used to monitor the impurities is a 2.2 m Rowland circle spectrometer utilizing a Reticon array fiber coupled to a microchannel plate. With a 600 lines/mm grating the $80<\lambda <1050\text{Å}$ range can be scanned, although only 40–100 Å can be observed for a single discharge. Recently, a flat-field grating spectrometer was installed which utilizes a varied line spacing grating to image the spectrum to a soft x-ray sensitive Princeton Instruments charge-coupled device camera. Using a 2400 lines/mm grating, the $10<\lambda <70\text{Å}$ range can be scanned with 5–6 nm observed for a single discharge. A variety of results from recent experiments are shown that highlight the capability to track a wide range of impurities.

A prototype infrared video bolometer (IRVB) was successfully deployed in the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak Upgrade (MAST Upgrade or MAST-U), the first deployment of such a diagnostic in a spherical tokamak. The IRVB was designed to study the radiation around the lower x-point, another first in tokamaks, and has the potential to estimate emissivity profiles with spatial resolution beyond what is achievable with resistive bolometry. The system was fully characterized prior to installation on MAST-U, and the results are summarized here. After installation, it was verified that the actual measurement geometry in the tokamak qualitatively matches the design; this is a particularly difficult process for bolometers and was done using specific features of the plasma itself. The installed IRVB measurements are consistent both with observations from other diagnostics, including magnetic reconstruction, visible light cameras, and resistive bolometry, as well as with the IRVB-designed view. Early results show that with conventional divertor geometry and only intrinsic impurities (for example, C and He), the progression of radiative detachment follows a similar path to that observed for large aspect ratio tokamaks: The peak of the radiation moves along the separatrix from the targets to the x-point and high-field side midplane with a toroidally symmetric structure that can eventually lead to strong effects on the core plasma inside the separatrix.