Posted on 01/23/2025 6:12:39 AM PST by Red Badger
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. Credit: HFIPS
China’s EAST project has set a new global record by maintaining a high-confinement plasma state for over 17 minutes, paving the way for future clean energy solutions by mimicking the sun’s fusion process.
China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), also known as the “artificial sun,” has set a new world record by sustaining high-confinement plasma for an impressive 1,066 seconds. This achievement, reached on January 20, marks a major step forward in the quest to develop fusion power as a clean and limitless energy source.
The 1,066-second milestone represents a significant leap in fusion research. It was accomplished by the Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This new record greatly exceeds the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023.
A Step Towards Unlimited Clean Energy
The ultimate goal of developing an artificial sun is to replicate the nuclear fusion processes that occur in the sun, providing humanity with a limitless and clean energy source, and enabling exploration beyond our solar system.
Scientists worldwide have dedicated over 70 years to this ambitious goal. However, generating electricity from a nuclear fusion device involves overcoming key challenges, including reaching temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius, maintaining stable long-term operation, and ensuring precise control of the fusion process.
Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak... EAST maintained a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for 1,066 seconds on January 20, 2025. Credit: HFIPS
Record-Setting Performance Enhancements
“A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is essential for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants,” said SONG Yuntao, ASIPP director and also vice president of HFIPS. He said that the recent record is monumental, marking a critical step toward realizing a functional fusion reactor.
According to GONG Xianzu, head of the EAST Physics and Experimental Operations division, several systems of the EAST device have been upgraded since the last round of experiments. For example, the heating system, which previously operated at the equivalent power of nearly 70,000 household microwave ovens, has now doubled its power output while maintaining stability and continuity.
Supporting International Fusion Research
Since its inception in 2006, EAST has served as an open testing platform for both Chinese and international scientists to conduct fusion-related experiments and research.
China officially joined the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program in 2006 as its seventh member. Under the agreement, China is responsible for approximately 9 percent of the project’s construction and operation, with ASIPP serving as the primary institution for the Chinese mission.
ITER, currently under construction in southern France, is set to become the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor upon completion.
In recent years, EAST has consistently achieved groundbreaking advancements in high-confinement mode, a fundamental operational mode for experimental fusion reactors like ITER and the future China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR). These accomplishments provide invaluable insights and references for the global development of fusion reactors.
“We hope to expand international collaboration via EAST and bring fusion energy into practical use for humanity,” said SONG.
In Hefei, Anhui Province, China, where EAST is located, a new generation of experimental fusion research facilities is currently under construction. These facilities aim to further accelerate the development and application of fusion energy.
When I graduated as a nuclear engineer in 1976, practical fusion power was supposed to be 25 to 50 years away. Near as I can tell it still is.
I get the feeling that TPTB don’t actually want it to happen at all. They just want the issue to dangle in font of us like a carrot on a stick to the donkey...........
The ITER in France is a massive construction. Quite impressive.
Yeah right. I’ll believe this like I believe they did not make the WuhanFlu. And, that most everything else coming from there can operate more than six months.
BS!
A lot, and coal power is the way out of this current dearth of power supply. Use it, build parts for smaller nuclear power plants, steel for cars, trucks, concrete, Iron for ships and missiles. Coal is natural and with the best filtration systems is really very clean.
I should have added, President Trump needs to put together a study group of REAL scientists and put to rest the myth of global climate change caused by excessive atmospheric CO 2. Delist it from a pollutant to a necesary part of our cycle of life on Earth.
WE NEED TO BURN THINGS, the planet thrives on the Carbon cycle.
Cubic inch by cubic inch our own bodies generate more heat than the sun. This is because ordinary Hydrogen does not fuse well. A Proton can bounce around for billions of years inside the suns core before it fuses to something else.
It is the isotopes of Hydrogen like Deuterium and Tritium that are needed to make fusion work here .
Einstein believed that actual measurement of Gravity waves would never happen. It took a century but now it is almost routine.
I like watching the moon rise or set. It is often red or orange. In the daytime when the moon sets it looks like it simply dissolves into the sky.
Picky Protons................
You cannot burn coal in air (nitrogen&oxygen) and not create NOx ,SOx and heavy metal vapors. No amount of post combustion filters or precipitation devices can remove those to zero/zero/zero levels. Especially the heavy metal in vapor form which is a product of combustion physics in an air fired process. You will never get the heavy metals down to part per billion or less levels. There is no safe level of biological exposure to heavy metals, science is clear on that.
So coal will never ever be clean it cannot physics limits it. You can make it cleaner but it will never be as clean as natural gas or even cleaner nuclear power. Nukes only release noble gasses to the air which are chemically and biologically inert.
You can clean coal before you burn it via gasification processes which do not use nitrogen atmospheres this eliminates NOx, with the lower temps of controlled gasification you also do not form heavy metal vapors they stay in the ash as solid oxides, while water soluble they are at least contained in the ash not up the stack inot our air and drinking waters. Then you can clean the syngas via a six stage gas clean up down to part per billion or less levels of SOx , and other VOCs such that all you are left with us CO,H2 and some CH4 all that get burnt in a gas turbine with SCR cats in the tail end to scrub out the NOx that still forms when you burn anything at high temps in air not pure oxygen.
You could go the oxy fired route and have a air separation plant next door feeding oxygen only to the turbines and gasification plant this would mean close cycle gas turbines using argon as the inert gas vs chemically active nitrogen in air. Co2 could also be used as the inert gas for closed cycle tirbines.
Syngas also works with solid oxide fuel cells eat CO or H2 as anode fuels with pure O2 on the cathode side you get CO2 and water as your only exhaust products. You have to have ppb or less sulfur levels or it will kill the fuel cells catalysts so only 6 stage clean syngas works there.
Coal burnt in air is best left in the dust bin of history it will always put out heavy metal vapors and NOx,soot and sulfur oxides no amount of post combustion filters can get it to zero or even to the same clean level of your average gas turbine. That’s just how physics works. Mitsubishi are the world leaders in coal gasification and they can get close to gas turbine clean but still not as clean as just burning methane without all the cheap that is in coal, the rock itself is loaded with impurities and contaminates there is no way around that fact.
Coal is the fuel that builds solar and wind turbines. How much pollution is being emitted, doing that, as compared to clean coal energy in the US? You can’t smelt iron with wind or solar, you nead coal to make coke, to melt steel.
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