The first artificial sun, created in China and called EAST, breaks all records and reaches 120 million degrees Celsius. With important implications for our planet.
One of the most beautiful aspects of progress is that, with the help of new technologies, we can potentially create anything. There are those who want to assemble artificial satellites made of mushrooms, those who have put together masks to save bees, and those who still design futuristic cities on Mars.
In China they then wanted to go further and create what we could call the first artificial sun. The project dates back to December 2019, when the Chinese government announced that it had created a device intended to replicate nuclear fusion, the same type of reaction that precisely powers the sun. A year later, the reactor was started for the first time, but only now does it return to capture the interest of the scientific community.
Yes because, by the own admission of its creators, on the morning of May 28, the Chinese EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) reactor reached a new world record. And it finally “lit up” as the most important of celestial bodies. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak has in fact touched the plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius, which managed to remain stable and above all controlled for 120 seconds. Not only that, for the next 20 seconds China’s “sun” touched 160 million degrees Celsius, at least according to local newspapers.
The previous record of 100 million degrees for 10 seconds was thus far surpassed, setting an exceptional milestone for research. For Li Miao, director of the Department of Physics at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, this is a key step in keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time, and in getting the nuclear fusion reactor up and running at full capacity.
If our sun can create this reaction naturally – mainly through the force of gravity – we must necessarily resort to super-powerful and stable generators to go and force the union of atoms. With deuterium, an element found primarily in water, we can power their movement: to give an example, a liter of seawater can produce the energy equivalent of 300 liters of gasoline through nuclear fusion.
We do not yet know when we will actually be able to use this type of energy. According to Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research, it will take at least 30 years to produce a working artificial sun. The current results are encouraging, however, and bring us closer and closer to that epochal moment in which we will be able to produce clean and virtually unlimited energy. Just like that of a star.
Andrea Guerriero