China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run
- Reference: 1737534547
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/01/22/china_tokamak_plasma_record_claim/
- Source link:
The operation was performed in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) which, [1]according to the institute , maintained the operation for 1,066 seconds – almost 18 minutes and considerably longer than the previous record of 403 seconds the facility achieved in 2023.
Creating plasma and keeping it contained is hard. Tokamaks do it in a chamber, often doughnut-shaped, that contains gases that are heated to high temperatures and subjected to enormous pressure until they becomes a plasma. That’s just the start of the fun, as that plasma is so hot it must then be contained with giant magnets lest it burn a Tokamak’s walls.
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Keeping the plasma hot, and contained, is no mean feat. So is inducing nuclear fusion in the plasma.
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Both are definitely feats worth attempting because the International Atomic Energy Association [5]rates the energy output of a fusion reaction as nearly four million times greater than the result of burning oil or coal, and four times greater than is possible with the nuclear fission process used in current nuclear power plants.
[6]Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream
[7]ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade
[8]Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high
[9]World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan
You can see evidence of fusion’s awesome power most days: it’s what makes the Sun shine.
Fusion occurs all the time on and within Sol, which has abundant energy and gravity to make it happen.
Here on Earth, creating hot plasma requires so much energy that Tokamaks didn’t verifiably make more energy than they consumed until a [10]2023 experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA.
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The Hefei Institutes of Physical Science’s announcement makes no mention of how much heat its long plasma burn produced, or if it could produce a net energy gain. Nor does it detail the fuel used to produce plasma, an important factoid. It’s also just a press release – not peer-reviewed work.
The statement nonetheless describes the experiment an event of “monumental significance” and “a critical step toward the realization of a functional fusion reactor.”
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The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak - Click to enlarge. [13]Image source
That may be an overstatement. But Sony Yuntao, vice president of HFIPS and a director of China’s Institute of Plasma Physics, is quoted as pointing out that "A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is essential for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants.”
This is the first time researchers have gone on the record with a claim of a thousand-seconds of sustained high-confinement plasma operations, so maybe the vivid language the Institute used isn’t entirely unjustified – especially as rival Tokamak the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor last year [14]pushed back the date on which it will first make plasma by a decade. ®
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[1] https://english.hf.cas.cn/nr/bth/202501/t20250121_899051.html
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z5DP0nDoPoLikXTPFZLKqQAAAYk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[5] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-is-nuclear-fusion
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/tokamak_fusion_pilot/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/04/iter_new_baseline_project_delays/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/09/jets_swansong_yields_fusion_record/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/04/jt_60sa_tokamak_online/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/14/nuclear_fusion_doe/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z5DP0nDoPoLikXTPFZLKqQAAAYk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/01/22/supplied_experimental_advanced_superconducting_tokamak.jpg
[13] https://english.cas.cn/head/202501/t20250121_899060.shtml
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/04/iter_new_baseline_project_delays/
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Sounds really good...
AFAIK China is part of ITER and all these projects are cooperating, which is the only the way to progress with fundamental research like this.
It would also be interesting to know what stopped it after 18 minutes. Did it just fizzle, or get too hot, or trip some safety device... ?
30 years
So that's one less thing needed in the rolling 30 years until Fusion arrives.
Re: 30 years
With this, we might be able to bring it down to 29 years 364 days.
I think eventually with advancements in AI - Nuclear Fusion energy production will be cracked one way or another.
AI is going to be great at improving processes, but pretty much useless at fundamental research, which is what most of this is about. The work done on fusion has meant pushing physics forward in all kinds of areas and discovering how much we've still got to learn.
There is no way I want AI anywhere near this!
The goal of Fusion power is 24x7x365 operation. AI's goal is to be right most of the time - they are not aligned.
Nobody in their right mind would put AI at the heart of a safety critical system, and certainly not one in continuous operation.
but I hear you say I ment AI would be useful with the research....
Again NO! We need to understand the research results, not just replicate an interesting result from many trail and error attempts (this is also true of pure human research as well)
Perhaps there is a space for AI to be used to investigate the huge potential solution space, and narrow it down to a smaller list of worth while investigation, but this could also be called a script tweaking each variable one at a time and not AI :-)
/Rattus
"not peer-reviewed work"
China regularly spurts out record claims in almost every domain, and many of them are either debunked or unverifiable.
If they really did this, it is a Good Thing (TM) , but until I hear reports of scientific confirmation, I'm going to refrain from congratulating them.
Re: "not peer-reviewed work"
At least they aren't claiming Cold Fusion.
Sounds really good...
... I am - of course - cautious when such big claims land (look at almost tripling the duration the plasma was stable!), but I really hope they pulled that off. It would show that they are on the right track.
Though, when I search ITER's homepage I find this article: https://www.iter.org/node/20687/east-demonstrates-1000-second-steady-state-plasma where they report a 1000s plasma confinement - from 2022, record set in 2021.
Digging a bit deeper: The now reported record is in a different configuration, the so-called high confinement mode, and EAST seems (despite the snark at the end of the comment) to be the preliminary project leading up to bigger (and hopefully working / viable) Tokamaks. One of them is ITER, and China also has the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR).