TFTR — the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory — was the machine that performed the first magnetically confined deuterium-tritium experiments in 1993, opening the study of 📝fusion-heated plasmas in a 📝Tokamak.
TFTR operated from 1982 to 1997 as the flagship of the U.S. magnetic fusion program. In December 1993 it became the first tokamak to run a full 50-50 mix of 📝deuterium and 📝tritium — the fuel of future power plants — and in 1994 it produced 10.7 megawatts of fusion power, then a world record. The distinction against 📝JET is one of sequence and degree: JET had injected a small tritium fraction in a 1991 preliminary experiment, but TFTR ran the first sustained campaign on reactor-grade fuel, and JET later surpassed its power record in 1997.
Beyond its records, TFTR's D-T campaigns produced the first direct measurements of 📝alpha heating — the self-heating of a plasma by its own fusion-born alpha particles — the effect on which every burning-plasma design depends. The machine also discovered enhanced confinement regimes such as supershots and demonstrated 📝tritium handling, neutron shielding, and remote maintenance in a working tokamak environment. Its copper magnets and pulsed operation marked it as an experiment, never a power-plant prototype; the 📝D-T reaction physics it pioneered passed to JET, and now to the burning-plasma machines that follow.