The Asian country has just achieved another milestone in the pursuit of humanity's dream of achieving nuclear fusion. A new record was announced at the Tokamak (East) reactor, which managed to sustain a stable fusion reaction for an impressive 1,066 seconds.
This fusion milestone is important because for decades scientists have pursued the idea of transforming the destructive force of the hydrogen bomb into a safe and inexhaustible source of electricity, to put it into perspective just 1 gram of deuterium tritium fuel contains an amount of energy equivalent to 11 tons of Coal.
In short, when commercial fusion becomes viable we could have clean and practically infinite energy. In the East reactor, the researchers doubled the output power and managed to keep the hydrogen plasma stable at very high temperatures, on the order of 100 to 150 million. of degrees Celsius, for almost 18 minutes, this surpasses the previous record of 43 seconds set in 2023.
The director of the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the goal is to operate continuously and stably for thousands of seconds so that fusion becomes a constant source of energy, the East reactor is not just an isolated experiment China is part of the ITER consortium that brings together seven international members to build the world's largest experimental Tokamak fusion reactor in the south of France.
Scheduled to enter into operation around 2035, ITER will take advantage of the lessons learned with the East that will be part of the Chinese contribution to the project. Maintaining a plasma of more than 100 million degrees is not easy, fusion requires extreme temperatures and pressures and above all stability for long periods.
Although science has already shown that it is capable of fusing atoms, doing so commercially, that is, generating more energy than it consumes, remains an enormous challenge, however, with multimillion-dollar investments and new technologies, the obstacles are being overcome, if fusion nuclear power becomes operational we could witness a leap in human technology like never before in history.
When this happens, the world we know today will be just a memory for those who lived through this turning point and a topic to be studied in history classes by future generations.
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