The National Spherical Torus Experiment Control Room

Also in the Control Room are physicists, who analyze data as it is taken during each plasma discharge, and software engineers, who help support this analysis. The Control Room is also equipped with audio and video to facilitate communication with off-site research team members.

The control room for NSTX is in the basement of the Lyman Spitzer Building on C-Site, while the NSTX device itself is on D-Site. There are two routes to NSTX: a surface route and an underground route through a 580 foot tunnel.

The tunnel was built in the late 1970's as part of the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) Project. It was designed to transport equipment, personnel, and to house the large number of cables required to connect the computers in the TFTR Control Room with tokamak systems in the Test Cell and Test Cell Basement. Fiber optics cables, for the electronic communication of the vast amounts of experimental data, became available during the TFTR construction period, and were substituted for the large cabling system originally planned. This resulted in the walls of the tunnel being largely free of cable trays.