China’s artificial sun sets record at 120 million degrees Celsius – 01/06/2022

A team of researchers at the Hefei Institute of Physical Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing announced that the “Chinese artificial sun” generated by the EAST (Tokamak Experimental Advanced Superconducting Reactor) nuclear fusion reactor set a record time, reaching 18 minutes at a temperature of 120 million degrees. percentage.

According to Phys.org, the progress is part of developing a clean energy source that should replace plants that use coal and other renewable resources. Chinese scientists intend to obtain sun-like energy and thus produce heat and light through fusion, a process in which atoms vibrate strongly when exposed to high temperatures, causing their nuclei to fuse.

In the case of the Sun, the atoms that undergo fusion are hydrogen. In this process, what happens is the formation of helium-4, which is an element lighter than the four protons found in atoms. This difference in mass ends with the generation of thermal energy released by the sun through light and heat.

For years, Chinese scientists have struggled to reproduce the same result found in the release of energy from the sun at facilities in the tokamak, which are used to heat a few atoms at high temperatures using microwaves, leading to the formation of hot plasma.

In the tokamak, the atoms of tritium and deuterium undergo very high heating of nearly 150 million degrees Celsius, which leads to the fusion of these chemical elements.

This procedure is necessary in order for the fusion reactions, which the researchers have developed, to be self-sustaining for a stable energy production, which is currently peaked at about 18 minutes at 120°C by the “artificial sun”.

Despite the high temperature, there is a barrier that prevents the doughnut test site from burning, due to the use of covering materials such as carbon resistant to very high temperatures.

last year, The longest time for a Chinese nuclear fusion reactor was 101 seconds at 120°C. Previously, 160 million degrees Celsius was reached for 20 seconds, a mark that exceeds the Sun’s 15 million degrees Celsius by more than ten times.

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According to Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times that the practical use of this unlimited, cleaner, sustainable energy could take up to 30 years to be commercialized.

Tokamak owns ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), which is headquartered in France and involves the European Union, the United States, Russia, South Korea, India and China in organizing the project.