A report published in ScienceAlert documents that the Chinese Academy of Sciences has beaten a world record for plasma fusion just seven months after announcing it.
The Institute of Plasma Physics announces that their ‘artificial Sun’ tokomak reactor has kept a swirling loop of plasma superheated to 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) for 1,056 seconds.
This also exceeds the previous record of 390 seconds achieved by the Tore Supra tokamak in France in 2003 for plasma confinement.
The EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, or HT-7U) reactor’s success is a significant step forward in the development of fusion energy.
The reactor reaches great temperatures by boiling hydrogen isotopes (hydrogen and deuterium) into a plasma. The fusion of these elements releases great amounts of energy, which takes the form of heat. Scientists now face the challenge of maintaining temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius and operating the setup in a stable way over long durations.
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EAST also broke the time record on December 30, 2021, narrowly missing out on its aim of 1,000 seconds in 2021.
Don’t get me wrong: fusion still has a long way to go. At the moment, a fusion generator expends significantly more energy than it produces; nonetheless, increasing the plasma confinement period is a critical step toward making self-sustaining plasma fusion a reality.
