China takes another step towards controlled nuclear fusion

Scientists working on China's "artificial sun" claim they have taken an "important step" towards self-sustaining nuclear fusion, a technology that could one day provide abundant supplies of clean energy. The project generated a plasma current of over 1 million amperes, or 1 mega-amp, according to the official Science and Technology Daily, a current strong enough to meet some of the key conditions needed to produce a functioning reactor.

Fusion, the same process that has caused the sun to burn for the past 5 billion years, is considered the ultimate solution to humanity's energy needs because, unlike current uranium-powered nuclear power plants, a fusion reactor would not produce radioactive waste. , but only energy and radiation.

Zhong Wulu, deputy director of the Institute of Fusion Science at the Southwestern Institute of Physics, told the paper, "This discovery marks an important step towards igniting fusion in Chinese nuclear fusion research."

The HL-2M experimental reactor in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, has approached the threshold needed for the reaction to become self-sufficient – operating without the need for an external power source.

Generating 1 mega-amp of power is also an important step because it fulfills two key conditions for a functioning reactor: meeting the required density for the atomic collision that produces the reaction and providing enough time for the reaction to take place. The third necessary condition is the presence of a sufficiently high temperature, equal to at least 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million Fahrenheit), will be the next target.

The HL-2M has already achieved this, generating a temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the sun, for over 10 seconds. The experimental reactor is China's largest advanced tokamak device – a type of reactor that uses a powerful magnetic field to produce reactions – according to the China National Nuclear Corporation, which oversees the project.
China sets a new world record in developing an "artificial sun".

“The large vacuum container of our tokamak device is filled with gas. We ionize the gas into plasma, then use a strong magnetic field to levitate the charged particles in the vacuum container, ”Zhong told Science and Technology Daily.

The device is designed to replicate the way the sun produces energy by fusing two types of hydrogen atoms together in a process that releases an enormous amount of energy.

China is also building the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor, the world's first power plant capable of turning fusion energy into electricity without disrupting the power grid. When completed, around 2035, it will produce an enormous amount of heat with an output of up to 2 gigawatts, according to the research team.

So China takes another step towards total energy autonomy through nuclear energy. Meanwhile, in Europe we are considering completing ITER …

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The article China takes another step towards controlled nuclear fusion comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-cina-compie-un-altro-passo-avanti-verso-la-fusione-nucleare-controllata/ on Fri, 21 Oct 2022 18:16:39 +0000.