Yesterday, October 21, the South China Morning Post, citing its sources, reported that Chinese scientists managed to take a big and quite important step towards nuclear fusion – specialists managed to get close to a stable thermonuclear reaction by creating an “artificial sun” in laboratory conditions . Scientists managed to achieve such an impressive result in this direction at the HL-2M Tokamak fusion reactor, which is located in Sichuan province – it was launched at the end of 2021, and now experts are talking about achieving two extremely important points on the path to clean energy.
Firstly, Chinese experts said that on the basis of the HL-2M Tokamak reactor, they managed to achieve an extremely high temperature of the material – under laboratory conditions, scientists managed to heat the plasma in the reactor to a temperature of 150 million ° C. Here I would like to note that this is about ten times hotter than the temperature of the core of the Sun. True, the steady process of heating to such an impressive temperature did not last long – the experts took 10 seconds to react, after which the temperature was lowered. True, in order to achieve the coveted temperature, specialists will eventually have to heat the plasma to about 200 million ° C.
Secondly, Chinese scientists managed to achieve a phenomenal current strength of 1 MA (1 million A), which allows conducting various experiments in a thermonuclear reactor, but, unfortunately, so far this value is not enough to achieve a thermonuclear reaction. The specialists recalled that the international experimental thermonuclear reactor ITER requires a current of 15 MA, so there is plenty of work in this direction. However, no one is in a hurry – Chinese scientists said that with the current roadmap, they will be able to present a working sample of a thermonuclear reactor by 2035, and they will be able to put the technology into operation in 2050.
Of course, various difficulties may arise on the way to achieving such an important goal, but scientists are quite ready for this. On the other hand, if the roadmap does not fail, then by the middle of this century, humanity will receive clean energy, the production of which does not generate harmful nuclear waste, plus the potential of a thermonuclear reactor is simply huge – it can easily solve all the energy problems of mankind on the planet. Then it will be possible to talk about the dominance of electric cars and travel to Mars.
Source: Trash Box
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