China’s Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei Jiangsu province, has reported (3 February) that experiments on their Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) facility have successfully created a sustained hydrogen plasma for a record 102 seconds, according to an article in the South China Morning Post.
The experiment required the team to solve a number of problems, such as the precise alignment of the magnets, and keeping the plasma particles and heat fully confined, the institute said. The plasma measured a temperature of 50 million degrees Celsius, which is about half of what would be required for deuterium-tritium fusion. Plasmas with higher temperatures have been achieved before (for example by Princeton, in the late 1970s) but containment of the plasma has been in only the tens of seconds.
The previous week, German researchers at the Max Planck Institute’s Wendelstein 7-X stellarator managed to achieve a plasma of 80 million degrees Celsius, but only for a quarter of a second.
EAST’s goal is to sustain 100 m degrees in the plasma for 1000 seconds, as the next step towards steady-state operation, which will be required for commercial power production. These recent experimental results and all of the progress on EAST will be applied to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) under construction at Cadarache in France. The Chinese scientists also work closely with fusion researchers at General Atomics, and their DIII-D tokamak, in California.
