China’s Artificial Sun EAST

In News

• Recently, China’s “artificial sun” ran for more than 17 minutes at five times hotter than the real sun.

About the Experiment

• Researchers managed to run the “artificial sun” at 70 million degrees for as long as 1,056 seconds, or 17 minutes, 36 seconds.
• The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental foundation towards the running of a fusion reactor.

Experiential Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST)

• About:
  • It is a nuclear fusion reactor facility, designed and developed by China.
  • The facility is called an “artificial sun” because it mimics the nuclear fusion reaction that powers the real sun – which uses hydrogen and deuterium gases as fuel.
  • The EAST has been used since 2006 by scientists from all around the world to conduct fusion-related experiments.
  • The EAST project is part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) facility, which will become the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor when it becomes operational in 2035. 
• Purpose:
  • To replicate the process of nuclear fusion, which is the same reaction that powers the sun.
• Working:
  • The EAST harnesses extremely high temperatures to boil hydrogen isotopes into a plasma, fusing them together and releasing energy.
  • Fuel is heated to temperatures of over 150 million degrees C so that it forms a hot plasma “soup” of subatomic particles. 
  • With the help of a strong magnetic field, the plasma is kept away from the walls of the reactor to ensure it does not cool down and lose its potential to generate large amounts of energy. 
  • The nuclei of deuterium and tritium — both found in hydrogen — are made to fuse together to create a helium nucleus, a neutron along with a whole lot of energy.

Significance

• Near-limitless clean energy: The machine will help harness the power of nuclear fusion, which would create unlimited clean energy by mimicking reactions that naturally occur inside the sun.
• No hazardous materials: The process requires no fossil fuels and leaves behind no hazardous waste materials, unlike the nuclear fission process that powers commercial nuclear energy production. 
• Less Disaster: Physicists also claim that there is far less risk of an environmental disaster.

Challenges

• Keeping the temperature over 100 million degrees.
• Operating at a stable level for a long time.
• Nuclear fusion remains a long way from being realised outside of a laboratory, despite decades of research into the technology.

Conclusion

• Although these are significant developments, there is still a lot to go before the world is able to see a fully functioning artificial sun.

Source: NY