China's $1 trillion 'artificial sun'

Tokamak 'artificial sun' of China

Recently, the technology dubbed "Artificial Sun" of China has set a new world record after reaching a temperature 5 times hotter than the Sun in more than 17 minutes.

According to Xinhua , the EAST Nuclear Fusion Reactor (based on the Tokamak advanced superconducting test line) can maintain a temperature of 158 million degrees Fahrenheit (70 million degrees Celsius) for 1,056 seconds. 

This achievement has brought scientists a small but significant step closer to creating an almost unlimited source of clean energy on Earth.

That's because fusion energy is considered the "ultimate energy" for a carbon-neutral energy future, because hydrogen and deuterium are abundant on Earth, clean, and have fewer emissions.

China's experimental nuclear fusion reactor broke the previous record, set by Tore Supra (France) in 2003. In addition, EAST also set another record in May 2021. by remaining for 101 seconds at a temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius. For comparison, the core of the Sun has a temperature of about 15 million degrees.

Gong Xianzu, head of the research team at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, asserted that this operation has laid a solid scientific and experimental foundation for operating a fusion reactor under real-world conditions.

For nearly a century, scientists have been trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion - also known as the process by which stars ignite. By fusing hydrogen atoms to create helium under extreme pressure and temperature, the experiment was able to convert matter into light and heat, generating enormous amounts of energy without emitting greenhouse gases. or radioactive waste.

But recreating the conditions found inside stars is no simple task. The most common design for a fusion reactor, the tokamak, works by heating rods of plasma before locking it inside a chamber that reacts with a strong magnetic field.

In 1958, Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky successfully designed the first tokamak, but no one has yet been able to create an experimental reactor that can produce more energy than it consumes.

EAST - China's potential fusion reactor project is the product of cooperation between 35 countries - including every state of the European Union, Great Britain, China, India and the US makes the above theory becomes possible, containing the world's strongest magnets, making it capable of generating a magnetic field 280,000 times stronger than the one around the Earth.

The project, which will likely cost China more than $1 trillion by the time the trial ends (June 2022), is expected to go into operation in 2025, which will provide scientists with new insights. know more deeply about the practice of harnessing the power of the stars on Earth.

According to Live Science