2d ago

China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds

www.livescience.com China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds

A nuclear fusion reactor in China, dubbed the "artificial sun," has broken its own record to bring humanity one step closer to near-limitless clean energy.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) nuclear fusion reactor maintained a steady, highly confined loop of plasma — the high-energy fourth state of matter — for 1,066 seconds on Monday (Jan. 20), which more than doubled its previous best of 403 seconds, Chinese state media reported.

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1w ago

China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds

www.livescience.com /planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chinas-artificial-sun-shatters-nuclear-fusion-record-by-generating-steady-loop-of-plasma-for-1-000-seconds

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Innovative industry frontrunners:
solar panels: US China
electric vehicles: US China
trains: US China
A.I.: US China
Fusion Energy: US China
Weapons: US
We're really making america great again 🇺🇸
- Can we cool it with the nationalism for just 1 week
- Haha cute propaganda.
  China uses western tech for most of its production and steals what it can’t get freely, its trains are Japanese, and America has been first on AI this whole time with China scoring one so-so win that will be irrelevant in 3 weeks when another new big model comes out as they always do.
  America sucks, but China is not better.
  
  Not propaganda, just a guy commiserating as his country gets flushed down the toilet to keep some oil billionaires rich until the climate collapse.
  Also China is switching off japanese designs in favor of the new fuxing that were designed and manufactured in China and are faster then the latest e7 shinkansen . That's why Indonesia ordered them for their new HSR. Even if they used japanese trains, they are still light years ahead of the U.S. where we're still struggling to build our first line.
  America sucks, but China is not better
  For sure politically, but if I we're to make a bet economically who's gonna dominate 21st century industries I'm going with China. There was some hope that Bidens IRA would turn that around but those hopes we're dashed in this past week.

This isn't sustained fusion, just to be clear - this is a big deal because they've managed to develop a method of keeping the plasma from grounding out for ~16 minutes, and plasma modeling is one of the key areas for fusion to become a viable power source (that is, in a tokamak. WX-7, another ITER reactor, is doing it's own very cool thing and will likely break this record by 2x within a couple months, but stellerators aren't tokamaks and this is still super important work!). But they aren't getting power out of it, we're still decades away from that (and the US just dropped... er... all of their funding for science)

Great news! The fact it was double the previous record is exciting.

Is this a real photo? Do they always have a flag on top?

Damn that's like 16 minutes!? Exciting!

Sounds like the year of Linux is upon us!

Well, if China gets fusion... lol. Interesting times.
- Not just China. EAST is part of the ITER program so the data will be available to the other participating nations as well – especially since EAST is a testbed for the actual ITER, which is currently being constructed in France.
  This is stuff we've had international cooperation on since the mid-80s, with China joining in 2003. When we get fusion we all get fusion. Well, all of the rich countries who are participating in the project do.
  I'd also like to point out that EAST is not the only promising fusion reactor. A team in Germany is experimenting with stellarators (a competing reactor type; EAST is a tokamak) and are currently working on scaling their current one from its current 100 seconds of operation to 30 minutes.
  
  international collaboration > nationalism, every time
- That's one way to get rid of the petrodollar
  
  Birth of the Fusyuan.

Chinese Doc Ock when?
- There's no k in octopus

Interesting. I'm still skeptical of any further implications, in the "Fusion has been 20 years away for the past 70 years" sense, but this is fascinating work.

18 comments