Meanwhile, the SPARC nuclear fusion reactor, a US project involving MIT, is currently in development in Devens, Massachusetts. Last month, the government shortlisted five sites as the potential home for the nuclear fusion reactor – Ardeer in North Ayrshire, Goole in Yorkshire, Moorside in Cumbria, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire and Severn Edge in Gloucestershire. In the UK, Boris Johnson's government is also planning to build a nuclear fusion power station as part of its 'green industrial revolution'. The Provence-based ITER project is expected to begin delivering power in 2035, and will become the world's biggest reactor once completed. Located in China's eastern Anhui province and completed late 2020, the reactor is often called an 'artificial sun' on account of the enormous heat and power it produces.įusion power plants are set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power-generation sector, which is one of the major sources of these emissions globally.įusion could eventually combat climate change by replacing energy sources that emit greenhouse gases, such as coal and gas.įusion power works by colliding heavy hydrogen atoms to form helium - releasing vast amounts of energy in the process, as occurs naturally in the centre of starsĬhinese scientists plan to use the nuclear fusion reactor in collaboration with scientists in France working on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Plasma is superheated matter so hot that the electrons are ripped away from the atoms, forming an ionised gas.Ĭhina says its reactor is designed to replicate the nuclear fusion process that occurs naturally in the Sun and stars to provide almost infinite clean energy. Plasma – often referred to the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas – is produced when the atoms in a gas become ionised. 'This time, steady-state plasma operation was sustained for 1,056 seconds at a temperature close to 70 million degrees Celsius, laying a solid scientific and experimental foundation toward the running of a fusion reactor.'Īt its heart of EAST and other fusion reactors is the tokamak, a device initially conceptualised in the 1950s by Soviet physicists.Ī tokamak uses a powerful magnetic field to confine the hydrogen isotopes into a spherical shape, similar to a cored apple, as they are heated by microwaves into a plasma to produce fusion. 'We achieved a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in an experiment in the first half of 2021,' said Xianzu, as quoted by Xinhua. The breakthrough was announced on Friday by Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who is in charge of the experiment conducted in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province.
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