ARTIFICIAL SUN

Subject: International Events

Context : China successfully powered up its “artificial sun” nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, state media reported Friday, marking a great advance in the country’s nuclear power research capabilities

Concept:

• The artificial Sun (not to be confused with the ‘artificial moons’ China intends to send up to space soon), is a popular name given to one of the most promising nuclear fusion experiments to date.
• Designed to replicate the process our Sun uses to generate energy, researchers set up the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion reactor in 2006.
• A ‘Tokamak’ is a reactor design that resembles a donut — a donut that generates powerful magnetic forces to contain unimaginably hot plasma inside the reactor during nuclear fusion. The walls of a tokamak are built to absorb the massive amounts of heat from the continuous splitting of atoms in the reactor’s core.
• The artificial sun’s plasma is mainly composed of electrons and ions, and the country’s existing Tokamak devices have achieved an electron temperature of over100 million degrees C in its core plasma, and an ion temperature of 50 million C, and it is the ion that generates energy in the device.
• The HL-2M Tokamak will be able to achieve an ion temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius, about seven times hotter than the real Sun’s ion temperature.
• The process of nuclear fusion, where two hydrogen atoms combine in a reaction that produces an enormous amount of energy, is often called the ‘great white whale’ of global energy.
• Nuclear reactors like EAST are a means to exactly that: an almost infinite supply of energy that is clean.