Upgrade began operation on 29 October 2020. One of MAST Upgrade's most notable features is the Super-X divertor. The divertor removes excess heat and impurities from the plasma. Conventional divertor designs, at powerplant scale, will experience high heat loads and will need to be regularly replaced. The Super-X divertor was expected to produce heat loads that are lower by around a factor of ten and has been seen as initially successful. Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production The design of the next generation Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) began in 2019 with £220 million in government funding. The plan is to begin operations in the 2040s. The current plan does not include a tritium generation facility. See also National Spherical Torus Experiment, US version - 1st plasma 1999. List of fusion experiments ELM (Edge Localized Mode) Ball-pen probe Langmuir probe Resonant magnetic perturbations References External links MAST Main Page Photos of MAST First results from MAST. 2001 Summary of first 6 months MAST Upgrade Research Plan, November 2019 Tokamaks Culham Centre for Fusion Energy