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China has gone one step. Its fusion reactor tests have created plasma that hit a temperature of 90 million degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the core of the Sun, and sustained it for nearly two minutes, 102 seconds to be precise.
Ensuring those temperatures can be sustained for long enough is essential to creating energy—the long-term goal of such fusion reactors. We’d need the reactions to run for long periods of time because getting them started requires a huge input of energy: If they stall too soon, the reaction is net negative in energy terms. But controlling such intense heat is difficult, because such high energies causes great instabilities that are hard to confine. So running an experiment at such temperatures for 102 seconds is a positive step indeed.
The news comes on the back of successful tests at the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald just last week, where hydrogen fuel was used for the first time in its Wendelstein 7-X stellarator.
It’s not the hottest temperature ever created on Earth. That accolade goes to the scorching conditions created by the LHC, which managed to create a plasma “soup” of sub-atomic gluons and quarks with an estimated temperature of 10 trillion degrees. That’s somewhere in the region of 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. But those conditions last for the merest flicker of time, which is useless for actually creating energy.
Indeed, most scientists suggest that the long-yet-intense burn required for fusion needs to be around 180 million degrees—so we still have some way to go. The consensus seems to suggest that it’ll be a decade or more before one of these rigs is capable of actually producing electricity for us.
Agencies/Canadajournal
What does that mean, “China has gone one step” ?
I am a layman but one with a good mind and understanding of how things work. I am curious about the article published. It says that the 90M F temperature is considerably hotter than the calculated temperature of the core of our sun itself. It also says that the temperature of 180M F is probably required to sustain a fusion reaction in order to create electricity for us to use. Considering that the sun is able to sustain the reaction at less than 90M F and yet we cannot until we reach that 180M F mark are we then really talking less about temperature required and more about pressure. That is being able to sustain the fusion reaction at 180M F because the pressures required to reach that sustained fusion reactions on the Earth simply generates that kind of temperature?
The difference does indeed have to do not being able to replicate the pressures within the core of the sun. Because the pressures cannot be duplicated the required temperatures for self sustaining fusion are higher than what exists in the core.
This is not possible…Three times the heat of the sun cannot be attained or contained…
IF so, it is a great way to destroy the planet…Good going world governments you bunch f’ing of idiots!