The BEC Crew report that just last week, we reported that the German revolutionary nuclear fusion machine managed to heat hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees Celsius, and sustain a cloud of hydrogen plasma for a quarter of a second. This was a huge milestone in the decades-long pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion, because if we can produce and hold onto hydrogen plasma for a certain period, we can harness the clean, practically limitless energy that fuels our Sun.
Now physicists in China have announced that their own nuclear fusion machine, called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has produced hydrogen plasma at 49.999 million degrees Celsius, and held onto it for an impressive 102 seconds.
While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has been produced by an experiment, that honor goes to the Large Hadron Collider, which hit a whopping 4 trillion degrees Celsius (250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun) back in 2012, the team from the Chinese Institute of Physical Science in Hefei managed to recreate solar conditions for well over a minute.
Sustaining these incredibly high temperatures for long enough to harness the energy produced by the reaction is key to achieving controlled nuclear fusion, as it allows for more stable alignment of the magnetic fields that are used to hold the plasma away from the walls of the machine, and the collection of high-energy particles and heat energy that are produced as part of the reaction.
Now, we must make it clear that the results coming out of China are based on a statement by the Hefei Institute of Physical Science, and until we see a peer-reviewed paper detailing how they achieved these temperatures and times, we have to remain skeptical. But if everything checks out, we really do have a bonafide battle of the doughnut-shaped nuclear fusion machines on our hands, with the Germans needing to work on their time, and the Chinese needing to work on their temperatures.
Game on ...
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