I got to climb inside a tokamak...

I went to Disneyland on Tuesday for a company trip, and while spending several hours in the park with only co-workers there was cool, what was more cool was the stop at the UCLA Energy Science Lab we made on the way back.

I'd driven down with a group of coworkers rather than suffer through the airport experience, and it turns out Pete and Ian knew someone at UCLA who got us a tour of the Energy Science Lab's Electric Tokamak. We got to climb inside since it's in the middle of being renovated, and here are my pics.

200 tons of steel torus, and another hundred tons of magnets

Here's a shot of the entrance to the torus

Me about to climb inside.

Me inside, looking out.

A shot of the inside of the torus

To give some perspective of the size, here's a shot of Pete and Chris inside.

Me inside, with our guide Russell to my right.

Me in front of one of the 5 Farad capacitor banks.

They have two banks like this and each of the blue cylinders is a 1500 microfarad cap.

Me in front of a linear accelerator in the basement.

The accelerators and tokamak need their own substation - each of the big blue boxes here is 1 megawatt.

Here's a pic of the small accelerator.

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This one was running, here's the video