CHINA (Reuters) – Chinese scientists are on the verge of a major new dawn in the construction of a next-generation “artificial sun”, as they bid to make a breakthrough in the development China’s largest Tokamak, a device which can produce controlled thermonuclear fusion power.
The efforts continue after decades of work by Chinese scientists, who dreamed to “build a sun” as far back as 1985, when a group of 35 industrial nations and blocs including China, the European Union, India, Japan, and Russia agreed on building the world’s first fusion device – the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).
Designed to be the first fusion device to test the integrated technologies, materials, and physics regimes necessary for the commercial production of fusion-based electricity, ITER is expected to bring a huge energy revolution once realized.
“If we succeed, one liter of seawater after nuclear fusion can produce energy equal to 300 liters of gasoline. If we can build a fusion power plant in the future successfully, we will be able to provide unlimited energy to the people,” said Song Yuntao, deputy director of the Institute of Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP).
As one of the major components of ITER, China officially started to build the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), dubbed the “artificial sun”, a controllable fusion reactor apparatus designed to generate energy by mimicking the nuclear fusion process of the real sun, in 1999.
But as soon as the EAST project started, scientists encountered some real troubles.
“At the early stage of the project, the United States agreed to provide superconducting materials for us. But then they refused to give that to us, how could we build the experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak without the superconducting material? We were all dumbfounded,” Song said.
There was no way a superconducting device could be built without the all-important superconducting material. So scientists were left with no choice but to turn this disappointment into a driving force to up their game and develop their own superconducting material technology.
Global News 
Leave a comment