China’s Artificial Star is 7-Times Hotter Than the Sun
Chinese scientists announced that they have developed
the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a nuclear fusion
reactor that achieved a temperature exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius in
its core plasma during a four-month experiment this year, which is
approximately seven times greater than the 15 million degrees Celsius interior
of the sun. This breakthrough enabled researchers to study how plasma reacts at
such temperatures, which could one day lead to the technology becoming a safe
and reliable option for limitless, clean energy.
Medical
researcher Zhang Tiankan said that to achieve sustained fusion energy,
researchers would need to raise the temperature to “hundreds of millions of
degrees” and lengthen the pulse to “thousands of seconds”, with more research
needed to enhance the control-ability of the reaction and realize the goal of
creating energy using the same process that powers the sun.
“It’s
certainly a significant step for China’s nuclear fusion program and an
important development for the whole world,” Dr Hole said, adding that
developing fusion reactors could be the solution to global energy problems. The
benefit is simple in that it is very large-scale base load [continuous] energy
production, with zero greenhouse gas emissions and no long-life radioactive
waste,” said associate professor Matthew Hole from the Australian National
University to ABC News.
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