More good news from China's nuclear fusion device "Artificial Sun." the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Hefei, Anhui Province successfully maintained a temperature of 70 million degrees Celsius for 17 minutes.
Scientists have long hoped to build a device on Earth with energy comparable to the "sun" but, to build a star on earth, the temperature of plasma must first be raised and then stabilized. The core of the sun is approximately 27 million degrees Celsius, fuses approximately 620 million tons of hydrogen into 616 million tons of helium every second, and converts 4 million tons of matter into energy.
In the past, China's EAST facility has raised plasma temperature to 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds, then maintained it at 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in May 2021 and 70 million degrees Celsius for 1,056 seconds on December 30 of the same year (17 minutes and 36 seconds, a record). None of the previous studies have succeeded in maintaining this kind of temperature for 1,000 seconds. Gong Xianzu of the Institute of Plasma Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences, stated that the recent test has laid a solid scientific and experimental foundation for the operation of a fusion reactor.
China is one of the seven members of the International Thermonuclear Fusion Experimental Reactor (ITER), and EAST research results will support ITER to achieve steady-state high-confinement discharge for scientific and engineering experiments.
The main reason why nuclear fusion equipment is hard to damage in a high temperature environment is that it uses super heat-resistant materials such as tungsten and carbon. These materials will not melt or become scorched and brittle at temperatures over 100 million degrees. The core is a vacuum area shaped like a "doughnut." Under extreme temperature and pressure, the gaseous hydrogen fuel in the vacuum area will be electrolyzed and ionized to form plasma. This ultra-high temperature plasma typically dissipates rapidly before approaching the inner wall.
In any case, it will take a lot of time and money to move experimental research out of the laboratory and into use. The ITER project, which includes the United States, Europe, China, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, has been deemed the most expensive scientific experiment and most complex project ever undertaken by mankind, and the time required to achieve their goals sometimes takes much longer than imagined.
(Image: EAST)
