The megaproject that promises to be able to generate almost unlimited clean energy thanks to the nuclear fusion process, was able to keep the plasma temperature stable at 70 million degrees Celsius for 1056 seconds for the first time.
Few countries have the ability to amaze the world that has China, especially the one we have known in the last two decades. For this reason, megaprojects like the one we are presenting to you on this occasion seem possible only in what many already consider to be the world’s leading power.
It’s about a big artificial sun, although this is not ‘hung’ from the sky or anything similar, but it is a reactor that generates nuclear energy and has been built with a budget of almost 1,000 million dollars (about 872 million euros) in a laboratory.
Specifically, we are talking about EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) or HL-2M Tokamak, which is ‘only’ one of three artificial suns being developed in China. The breakthrough was announced on Friday by Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP), who is in charge of the experiment in Hefei, capital of east China’s Anhui Province.
“We reached a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in an experiment in the first half of 2021. This time, steady-state plasma operation was kept for 1,056 seconds at a temperature close to 70 million degrees Celsius, laying a solid scientific and experimental foundation for the operation of a fusion reactor,” Gong said.
This is how China’s artificial sun works
As we have already advanced, the Tomakak is a spherical nuclear reactor which works under the principle of nuclear fusion. This is really the key and what makes it a milestone, since the conventional nuclear reactors present in all the Nuclear Power Plants in the world use nuclear fission.
During nuclear fission the nuclei of atoms separate to form smaller nuclei, releasing energy, in the nuclear fusion the opposite effect occurs, that is, energy is released when the nuclei of atoms combine or fuse together to form a larger nucleus.
This is EAST, the first artificial sun put into operation.
For practical purposes, the main advantage of nuclear fusion is that does not generate radioactive waste intrinsically, since the result of fusion is a well-known noble gas, helium, although it is true that it can indirectly activate structural materials in fusion power plants.
Also, we are talking about a practically inexhaustible source of energy of electricity production, since its fuel is made up of two isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium. These, therefore, are very abundant in nature.
The main challenge of the practical application as a source of energy is that the fusion reactor needs a very high temperature. This makes it necessary to have materials that are capable of withstanding these figures, which is why the great Chinese artificial sun is still in experimental phase.
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In any case, the first practical test seems to have been a success, so the scientific community is closely watching the progress made. “The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental basis for the operation of a fusion reactor”he declared to Gong Xianzu.
Additionally, they are developing a similar project in Marseille (France) and the UK has recently announced five possible locations for future construction of a Nuclear Fusion Power Plant.
The STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) project aims to produce a conceptual design by 2024 and deliver power to people’s homes sometime in the 2040s.