China’s “Artificial Sun” has Just Broken a New World Record

China has reached a new milestone in humanity’s experiments to control the power of the stars.

In May, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ fusion machine reached 120 million degrees Celsius and remained at that temperature for 101 seconds.

The last time the EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak or HT-7U) withstood a plasma vortex for so long was in 2017. However, the temperature only reached 50 million °C.

In 2018, the reactor kept the gas heated beyond the 100 million degrees reference considered crucial for power generation but could only sustain the plasma for about 10 seconds.

Now that it has kept the plasma at eight times the Sun’s core temperature of 15 million °C for such an extended period, the new record has brought the world ever closer to this elusive but much sought-after clean energy source.

“The discovery is significant progress, and the ultimate goal should be to keep the temperature at a steady level for a long time,” said physicist Li Miao University of Science and Technology of South China to the Global Times.

Fusion energy uses reactions deep in the Sun, compressing hydrogen atoms into larger elements such as helium. While the Sun relies on gravity to force atoms together, on Earth, we have to resort to less subtle means, raising temperatures in specially built generators to generate the atoms’ fusion forces.

The researchers estimate that the quantity of deuterium – a stable form of hydrogen-containing a proton and a neutron – in a liter of seawater could produce the equivalent of 300 liters of gasoline by nuclear fusion.

Around 300 scientists and engineers are needed to maintain and operate the experimental facility holding EAST. This large donut-shaped metal tube possesses a series of magnetic coils that retain superheated streams of hydrogen plasma rotating around the core.

The challenge is to keep the plasma in place long enough, in enough hellish heat, for fusion to take place. It needs to be much hotter than the Sun because our star’s much stronger gravity helps compress the nuclei – something we cannot replicate here on Earth.

With the theoretical potential to safely generate such large amounts of energy with no greenhouse gases and almost no radioactive waste, some consider fusion energy the holy grail of clean energy.

However, at the moment, nuclear fusion is not yet a certainty, with a fully functioning ‘artificial sun’ still probably decades away from us. We are still away from the point where a fusion reactor can produce more energy than it consumes, but some experts think we are getting close.

South Korea held the previous record of 100 million degrees °C for 20 seconds. Now China’s artificial Sun has also managed to reach 160 million degrees °C for 20 seconds, but there is still a lot to do to make the plasma stable at the high temperatures required.

Nuclear fusion is a big step towards a future post-carbon society. However, in the meantime, we must do everything we can to shift to proven clean energy technologies to ensure we can achieve that future.

We cannot afford to sit back and wait for a technological solution so attractive and fast, but each step forward for nuclear fusion is undoubtedly cause for enthusiasm.