China's Fusion Reactor

China's Trillion-Dollar 'Artificial Sun' Fusion Reactor Reaches Five Times Hotter Than the Sun

China's "artificial sun" set a new world record after overheating a plasma loop to temperatures five times higher than the sun for more than 17 minutes. According to China's state media Xinhua News Agency, the EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) nuclear fusion reactor maintained a temperature of 158 million Fahrenheit (70 million degrees Celsius) for 1,056 seconds. This achievement brings scientists closer to creating an almost unlimited clean energy source. China's experimental nuclear fusion reactor broke the previous record set in 2003 by France's Tore Supra tokamak, in which plasma in a plasma loop remained at similar temperatures for 390 seconds. EAST previously set another record in May 2021 by operating at an unprecedented 216 million F (120 million degrees) for 101 seconds. The real sun's core, by contrast, reaches a temperature of approximately 27 million F (15 million degrees Celsius). Gong Xianzu, the experiment leader and researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, stated that "the latest operation establishes a solid scientific and experimental foundation for operating a fusion reactor." Scientists have been attempting to harness the power of nuclear fusion (the process by which stars burn) for more than 70 years. These artificial stars can produce enormous amounts of energy by combining hydrogen atoms into helium under extremely high pressure and temperature, and converting matter into light and heat, without producing greenhouse gases or long-term radioactive waste. However, replicating the conditions found at the heart of stars is not an easy task. The tokamak, the most common design for fusion reactors, works by superheating plasma (one of four states of matter composed of positive ions and negatively charged free electrons) and confining it within a ring-shaped reactor chamber with powerful magnetic fields. Nevertheless, keeping turbulent and overheated plasma coils in place for nuclear fusion to occur has been a laborious process. Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky designed the first tokamak in 1958, but to date no one has succeeded in creating an experimental reactor that produces more energy than it consumes. One of the main obstacles has been how to control plasma hot enough to fuse. Fusion reactors require extremely high temperatures—many times hotter than the sun—because fusion on Earth must operate at much lower pressures than where it naturally occurs in the cores of stars. Bringing plasma to temperatures higher than the sun is the relatively easy part, but finding a way to wrap it so as not to burn the reactor walls (with lasers or magnetic fields) without disrupting the fusion process is technically difficult. When the experiment concluded in June, EAST is expected to have cost China more than 1 trillion dollars and is currently being used to test technologies for a larger fusion project under construction, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Marseille, France. ITER, identified as the world's largest nuclear reactor and the product of collaboration among 35 countries including every state in the European Union, United Kingdom, China, India and the United States, will contain the world's most powerful magnet and has the capacity to produce a magnetic field 280,000 times stronger than that around the Earth. The ITER fusion reactor is expected to come online in 2025, which will provide scientists with more information about the practicalities of harnessing star power on Earth. Additionally, China is working on more projects to develop nuclear fusion power, conducting internal confinement fusion experiments in this scope and planning to complete a new tokamak in the early 2030s. In addition, the first practical fusion reactor may be completed in the United States in 2025 (SPARC project) and a British company (Tokamak Energy) hopes to commercially produce electricity from fusion by 2030.   Source