Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough: China’s Tokamak Fusion Reactor Sets Major Record

HEFEI, CHINA — China’s $1 trillion Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak fusion reactor has superheated a loop of plasma to 70 million degrees Celsius, or five times hotter than the sun, for a new record of just over 17 minutes, according to Live Science, breaking the previous record of 390 seconds set by France’s Tore Supra tokamak in 2003. Nuclear fusion involves using extremely high pressures and temperatures to induce collisions between hydrogen atoms to make helium, which sees matter converted into light and heat. This process is at the heart of how stars are fuelled, and mimicking it is extremely desirable because it does not generate greenhouse gasses, or nuclear waste. One key difficulty, though, is that fusion reactors cannot recreate the same intense pressure for the reactions as stars, and thus must operate at much higher temperatures. Controlling plasma at these temperatures so it doesn’t burn through reactor walls, either with lasers or magnetic fields, is extremely problematic techni