Refueling a Nuclear Reactor

The hole at the far end of the blue cavity is the core of a nuclear reactor. The long tube in the middle of the core is the fuel assembly which consists of a bundle of long metal tubes filled with uranium pellets. This photo was taken while the spent fuel assembly was being removed.

Tokamak Fusion Reactor

In 1993 scientists at the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, at Princeton University’s plasma physics laboratory in New Jersey, produced a controlled fusion reaction, during which the temperature in the reactor surpassed three times that of the core of the sun. In a tokamak reactor, massive magnets confine hydrogen plasma under extremely high temperatures and pressures, forcing the hydrogen nuclei to fuse. When atomic nuclei are forced together in nuclear fusion, the reaction releases an extraordinary amount of energy.