Page 13 - IAV Digital Magazine #462

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Chinese “Fusion Reactor” Which Is 6 Time Hotter Than Sun
By Rohan
Nearly a month after revealing plans to launch an “artificial moon” simply on {top of} Chengdu, China, a university sim- ply declared that they have creat- ed an artificial sun(Fusion Reactor) that’s believed to be six times as powerful as Earth’s own sun.
Hefei Institute of
Physical Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences formal- ly declared on Tuesday that they have man- aged to succeed in a scorching level of a hun- dred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius) for its Experimental Advanced Superconducting tokamak (EAST) reactor.
EAST, the nick- name for China’s artificial sun, created its outstanding achievement throughout the superconduc- tor’s four-month- long experiment campaign this year.
The actual sun, meanwhile, only burns to con- cerning twenty seven million degrees Fahrenheit (14.9
million degrees Celsius), accord- ing to Shanghaiist.
“Scientists allot- ted the experi- ments on plas- ma equilibrium and instability, confinement and transport, plas- ma-wall interac- tion and ener- getic particle physics to demonstrate the very long time scale steady- state H-mode operation with
smart manage- ment of impurity, core/edge MHD stability, heat exhaust using an ITER-like tungsten diver- tor,” the institute wrote in its announcement article.
It’s simple to visualize why there’s most interest in fusion, however it’s hard to coax atoms along in a reactor. Once you get fission
going, it’s self- sustaining.
Fusion needs constant energy input because we don’t have the focused gravity of the sun to smash atoms along. The simplest method we’ve found to do it’s with a tokamak- style reactor — that’s what EAST is. A toka- mak heats hydrogen (usual- ly a deuterium isotope) to high temperatures till it becomes plas- ma.
Magnetic fields then squeeze the plasma along inside the reactor’s toroidal internal cham- ber. Some of the molecules can fuse and unhar- ness energy. However, all tokamak reac- tors so far have consumed addi- tional power than they creat- ed.
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