EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak)

2021: Plasma retention with 120 million degrees Celsius for almost two minutes

At the end of May 2021, it became known that Chinese researchers working on a nuclear fusion project managed to hold plasma with a temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for almost two minutes. This was a new record.

The state news agency Xinhua reported that the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, known as the "artificial sun," recorded a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius, maintained for 101 seconds. He was also able to keep the plasma temperature at 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds.

Chinese "artificial sun" set a new record

In 2020, the Chinese thermonuclear reactor hit the headlines when it became known that the EAST reached a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius within 20 seconds. A new experiment has shown that Chinese scientists have learned to maintain an extremely high temperature five times longer.

Another Chinese nuclear fusion project in Chengdu, the HL-2M Tokamak, at the end of 2020, during the experiment, operated at a temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius for 10 seconds. According to a physics professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, the next step will be to maintain such a temperature for a week.

China and Russia are part of the international group for the creation of the ITER nuclear fusion project in Europe. Nuclear fusion has become something of a modern philosopher's stone. The goal of scientists is to reproduce the nuclear fusion reactions that occur on the Sun, during which a huge amount of energy is released. But, despite progress in this area, thermonuclear reactors are still far from being implemented. Although the synthesis process itself is possible, as long as it consumes more energy than it generates.^[1]

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