Posted on Mar 12, 2019 in News, Science, Technology
China’s “Green New Deal”? China is close to launching its ‘artificial sun’ nuclear reactor, providing the nation with limitless, clean energy. Officials announced that the machine which will hold the ‘artificial sun’, called the HL-2M Tokamak, could be built this year using nuclear fusion in which hydrogen from sea water and readily available lithium is heated to more than 150 million°C. The current Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor in Hefei has created temperatures which exceed 100 million degrees Celsius – which is as hot as the interior of the sun.
“The artificial sun’s plasma is mainly composed of electrons and ions and the country’s existing Tokamak devices have achieved an electron temperature of over 100 million degrees C in its core plasma, and an ion temperature of 50 million C, and it is the ion that generates energy in the device,” said Dr Duan Xuru, an official at the China National Nuclear Corporation, according to China’s Global Times.
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In 2018, scientists announced they had sustained that temperature for 60 seconds, but the goal is to keep it going for upwards of one thousand seconds.
The Daily Galaxy via Global Times
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