The Chinese artificial Sun emulates the solar star’s power generation process and throughout its 15 years of operation, it has never managed to maintain so many degrees Celsius for so long.
Researchers working at China’s “artificial Sun” fusion facility – the Advanced Experimental Superconductor Tokamak, or HT-7U, (EAST) – have announced that on December 30, 2021 it broke a record, being able to maintain a plasma of 120 million degrees Celsius for 1,056 seconds.
This surpasses previous plasma confinement record of 390 seconds, established by the tokamak Tore Supra in France in 2003.
The Chinese “artificial sun” emulates the solar star’s power generation process Throughout its 15 years of operation, it has been operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) and has previously achieved both these temperatures and this containment time.
But nevertheless, never once, which makes this an important advance for fusion experimentation in the search for fusion energy.
In their announcement, the team noted that their results show that they are making steady progress toward their goals.
The race for nuclear fusion
The record comes amid growing race for nuclear fusion and its development as a source of energy.
The fusion might replace coal-fired power plants and probably also to other renewable resource plants. The basic idea is to imitate the Sun, which produces light and heat through fusion.
If scientists succeed in bringing this process to Earth, fusion energy might provide the world with a safe, sustainable, environmentally responsible source of energy and abundant, alternative to nuclear fission energy, which is used today in nuclear power plants.
Fusion vs. fission
The fusion process it is almost the opposite of the fission processInstead of separating the atoms of the heavy elements, it joins the atoms of the light elements to create heavier atoms.
Also, unlike fission, fusion would not produce direct radioactive waste, since the end product of the fusion process is helium.
In the same way, would not need a non-renewable fuel and as scarce as uranium or plutonium, but light and abundant materials such as deuterium.
In theory, these fuels can be obtained in large volumes from seawater, Newsweek reported.
There are experts who calculate that a liter of water would be enough to provide raw material for fusion to produce the equivalent energy to the combustion of 300 liters of oil.
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