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China creates an artificial sun

This report is from our 2018 archive. See what the Foundation does now.

Translated from Arabic. Read the original.

Follow this: China advances towards a new world

China creates a “clean artificial sun” more than six times hotter than the sun

The tokamak reactor nicknamed the “artificial sun”, developed by China in order to double its output of renewable energy, has reached a temperature of more than 100 million degrees Celsius.

Scientists estimate the temperature of the sun at 15 million degrees Celsius.

Working with local and international experts, the device known as EAST at the Hefei Institute of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences – after the introduction of integrated and efficient techniques for four types of heating power – produced an enormous amount of energy that no nuclear reactor had produced before.

The new techniques allowed the energy produced by the “EAST” device to exceed 10 megawatts, and raised the stored plasma energy to 300 kilojoules after scientists carried out further tests in the field of nuclear fusion.

Running the EAST machine costs about 15,000 dollars a day.

The researchers supervising the programme say the aim of building EAST is a broader understanding of the nuclear fusion process used in reactors, in order to consider other ways of producing energy, especially electricity.

But nuclear fusion is also used in the military field and is, as is well known, a precondition for the hydrogen bomb. This means the Chinese research may open the door to other fields.

Scientists say, however, that the motive behind the project is not military but scientific: to devise new ways of generating energy other than conventional nuclear power, which produces a quantity of “lethal” waste that is difficult to recycle.

https://arabic.euronews.com/2018/11/15/china-creates-clean-artificial-sun-over-six-times-the-temperature-of-the-sun