EAST — China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in Hefei — is the machine that holds the records for the longest plasma pulses, having sustained discharges beyond 1,000 seconds.
Operated by the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and producing first plasma in 2006, EAST was the first 📝Tokamak to combine fully superconducting toroidal and poloidal field coils, the configuration every subsequent superconducting machine has followed. That choice defines its mission. Copper-magnet tokamaks pulse for seconds before their coils overheat; EAST's niobium-titanium magnets run continuously, making it the world's primary testbed for the physics and engineering of long-pulse operation — 📝non-inductive current drive, actively cooled 📝plasma-facing components, and the slow-evolving instabilities that only appear when a discharge runs for minutes.
Its records trace that mission's progress: a 403-second high-confinement 📝plasma in 2023, and pulses surpassing 1,000 seconds — most recently 1,066 seconds in 2025. The near-neighbor comparison is KSTAR, Korea's superconducting tokamak: KSTAR has pushed the duration of very hot ion-temperature plasmas, while EAST has pushed total 📝pulse length and cumulative heating. Neither machine burns 📝fusion fuel; both are rehearsals for the 📝steady-state operation that power plants require, and EAST's results feed directly into the design of CFETR, China's planned next-step engineering test reactor.