China continues to amaze the world with its dreams of artificial celestial bodies. Just weeks after we learned that China is planning to deploy an artificial moon in orbit, Chinese engineers are reporting that they have built a solar simulator.
While China does not plan to put it into orbit, nevertheless, the temperature in the Chinese reactor is higher than the solar one and is about 100 million degrees Celsius.
According to astronomers, the temperature inside the Sun's core reaches about 15 million degrees Celsius. The artificial sun, of course, is many orders of magnitude smaller, so it has to be heated much more. Chinese scientists say this is caused by the minimum temperature required to create conditions suitable for nuclear fusion.
At a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius, the atomic nuclei of deuterium and tritium can be made to come close and react. The nuclei have the same charge, so they repel each other very strongly. However, the ultra-high temperature allows you to overcome this repulsive barrier.
Deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen, that is, an available source of free fuel for use. Scientists have been struggling to solve the problem of thermonuclear fusion for decades, but only now the Chinese company Tokamak Energy reports that it will build a ready-to-use thermonuclear reactor by 2030.
At the moment, the company sees its task in a deeper understanding of the problem of nuclear fusion and the development of technologies developed by it for mass industrial use. In the future, thermonuclear fusion will make it possible to produce any amount of electricity without the risk of accidents and with a minimum amount of hazardous waste requiring disposal. Instead of receiving energy by splitting nuclei, Tokamak Energy will synthesize these new nuclei.
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Inside the fusion reactor is a plasma heated to 100 million degrees Celsius. And the difficulties with this plasma are very significant, since this super-hot plasma cannot be allowed to come into contact with the matter of the reactor wall - the plasma must be confined by electric fields.
Today Tokamak Energy holds the world record in holding plasma in suspension: the company achieved the so-called steady-state H-state lasting 101.2 seconds in 2017.