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China Just Made a Major Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Research (techienews.co.uk)
New submitter TechnoidNash writes: China announced last week a major breakthrough in the realm of nuclear fusion research. The Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), was able to heat hydrogen gas to a temperature of near 50 million degrees Celsius for an unprecedented 102 seconds. While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research (that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius), it is the longest amount of time one has been maintained.
A practical fusion reactor has temperatures higher than the sun, because the sun has a horrible power density. Fusion reactions in the sun generate only about 100 wattas per cubic meter, and you need a lot more than that to get a net gain in a human built reactor of a reasonable size. The target is usually around 10 keV for DT fusion, or about 120 million K.
Keep in mind this is China's news, the same ones who tell us Taiwan/Hong Kong/Tibet/South sea islands is belonged to China, nothing bad ever happen on Tiananmen square, there is no corruption in China (except a few to make example of, the rest of the world is polluted as bad as China (lol no) and countless other lies about their country to surpress to people/save face.
There are a lot of posts about how we can't trust China, but for any one who has followed fusion work, this should be no surprise. EAST has been one of the major research tokamaks in the world, and results like this are incremental results that were expected to come about. What is more interesting is how cheap EAST and some other Chinese fusion research facilities are, like KTX which I am more familiar with and has been both cheap and fast. Yet they still contribute new results and share info at conferences, so it is not like they are just a lagging copy of other countries.