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November 16, 2018

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‘Artificial sun’ hits fusion energy mark

The experimental advanced superconducting tokamak, or the “Chinese artificial sun,” achieved an electron temperature of over 100 million degrees in its core plasma, a key step toward the test running of the fusion reactor, a lab oratory in east China’s Anhui Province said.

The ultimate goal of EAST is to create nuclear fusion like the Sun using deuterium that abound in the sea to provide a steady stream of clean energy, said Gong Xianzu, director of the experiment.

The four-month experiment shows China is making significant progress toward tokamak-based fusion energy production, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said.

The achieved temperature is about seven times more than the interior of the Sun, which is about 15 million degrees Celsius. Gong said that the experimental temperature was about 50 million degrees Celsius last year.

The plasma current density profile was optimized through the effective integration and synergy of four kinds of heating power: lower hybrid wave heating, electron cyclotron wave heating, ion cyclotron resonance heating and neutral beam ion heating.




 

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