China broke a record with its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion reactor when it sustained a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds. That is 10 times hotter than the core temperature of the sun.
The reactor was also able to sustain a temperature of 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds.
For perspective, the core of our solar system’s Sun “only” reaches about 15 million degrees Celsius. So, for a moment, the reactor got more than 10 times hotter than that.
“The breakthrough is significant progress, and the ultimate goal should be keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time,” said Li Miao, the director of the department of physics at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, to the Global Times.
The reactor smashed its previously reached record temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius in 2018.
Lin Boqiang, the director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times that nuclear fusion ultimately represents the future for clean energy — though he said that it is likely going to be decades before a working reactor emerges from experimental stages.
“It’s more like a future technology that’s critical for China’s green development push,” Boqiang told the Global Times.
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Last modified: June 14, 2021
