According to official media, China successfully turned up its “artificial sun” nuclear fusion reactor for the first time on Friday, signaling a significant advancement in the country’s atomic energy research capacity. The HL-2M Tokamak reactor is China’s largest and most comprehensive nuclear fusion experimental research equipment. Experts believe it can unlock a vital new source of clean energy.
According to the People’s Daily, it employs a powerful magnetic field to fuse hot plasma. As a result, the Reactor reaches over 150 million degrees Celsius – around ten times hotter than the center of the sun.
The HL-2M tokamak has been in operation since 2006, but today’s activation signifies the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) team’s journey to actual fusion ignition after years of preparation and preparation.
EAST, like many other tokamak projects throughout the world, has already achieved fusion. To recap, inside a tokamak’s donut-shaped (or occasionally more spherical) confinement, sun-hot plasma swirls in a circular kept in place by supercooled electromagnets.
This magnetic field is the only thing separating 360-million-degree plasma from a slew of artificial objects that clearly cannot withstand that temperature. The plasma is created by smashing together various nuclei, fusing them rather than separating them.
The Reactor, which is located in southern Sichuan province and was finished late last year, is commonly referred to as an “artificial sun” because of the enormous heat and electricity it generates.
Fusion is considered the Holy Grail of energy and is responsible for the sun’s strength. It combines atomic nuclei to generate large quantities of energy, which is the inverse of the fission process employed in nuclear weapons and power plants, which separates them into fragments.
Unlike fission, fusion produces no greenhouse emissions and has less chance of accidents or atomic material theft.
Song Yuntao, director of ASIPP, praised the achievement, calling it a “great success” in China’s physics and engineering sectors. He went on to say that the success of the experiment has created the groundwork for China to establish its nuclear fusion energy facility.
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