China has moved forward from creating cheap toys, lights and other consumer items to actually creating an artificial sun.
China's new generation of "artificial sun" nuclear fusion experimental device again a major breakthrough pic.twitter.com/JSoww7zeS4
— sorys,404 (@wrooongs) November 4, 2016
Earlier this year in February, Chinese scientists were able to make a nuclear reactor plasma reach a temperature of 50 million Kelvins (or, 49.999 million degrees Celsius) -which is thrice as hot as the sun’s 15 million Kelvins core. And now they have managed to keep it glowing for more than a minute.
This nuclear reactor is known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). It is placed at the Institute of Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangsu province of China.
This fusion was aimed to replicate the occurrences in the core of the sun. The reactor created plasma, which is a hot ionised gas. In it, atoms are fused together to create huge amounts of energy.
The experiment is a huge step forward in the nuclear fusion research. It takes us one step closer to replacing the conventional fossil fuels that are on the verge of depletion.
A similar attempt was made by East in 2012 and then they were able to generate the glow from the plasma for 32 seconds, breaking the world record at that time. Since then, EAST has upgraded its tungsten diverters and auxiliary heating system leading to the 60-second long creation of long-pulse, high-confinement plasma.
The EAST was established in 2006 and the fusion reactor is run by the Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei. The aim of he institute is to have plasma pulses lasting up to 1,000 seconds.
