Fusion researchers in China will bring their artificial sun up to full speed in 2020.

This superpowered tokamak device and the related stellarator device form the bulk of fusion technology research.

Tokamaks are touchy and prone to destabilizing, which these scientists hope to study and ameliorate.

China has announced advancing plans for its nuclear fusion device known colloquially as an “ artificial sun .” They say the device, which will reach temperatures of up to 360 million degrees Fahrenheit, is actually more like 12 artificial suns combined. The extremely high temperatures lead to the titular effect: literally, the nucleuses of two or more atoms are fused, and the process generates energy.

The experimental device, the HL-2M Tokamak, is the largest of its kind to date. A tokamak is a specific kind of fusion reactor that’s been theorized about since the 1950s, when Soviet scientists coined the term as a shortening of the Russian for “toroidal magnetic confinement.” The name is perfectly descriptive. A tokamak is a torus—the math term for a donut—in which extremely heated plasma is trapped and pressed into making chemical reactions.

There have been hundreds of small tokamaks in experimental lab settings around the world in the last 40 or more years. The plasma inside a tokamak is held there by magnetic fields, and these are prone to imperfections that can turn into disruptive flaws. Controlling them is really hard. Studying the tokamak has taken so long, and sometimes seemed so impossible to implement at large scale rather than just wildly improbable, that a second related device has threatened to overtake it in the public eye.

The stellarator, a descendent in a way and an even wilder-looking assemblage of ideas, is supposed to be more stable and less likely to spin out. It made the news in 2015 when a breakthrough with the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator led people to wonder if this new energy donut would surpass the old. But the two devices, the stellarator and the tokamak, have been developed almost in parallel by different teams since the very beginning. The 2015 stellarator breakthrough represented a milestone, but an early, experimental one.

China’s HL-2M Tokamak is known by its official name, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). Scientists first switched it in on 2006, but achieving milestones with EAST is hard work over many years. In 2018, it reached 180 million degrees Fahrenheit—halfway to the optimal operating temperature the team says it will reach in 2020.

In a way, EAST is proof of concept for a larger plasma fusion reactor. In a safe lab context, scientists can observe how the tokamak behaves. Because of the way they’re designed, tokamaks tend to throw the hottest, most energetic particles outside of their cores. They can instantly destabilize and fall out of the plasma-reactive zone, and most must be heated externally up to the 180 million Fahrenheit mark.

EAST is supposed to maintain that heat by itself, and its researchers have reached plasma states for tiny intervals of time during the last 13 years. Their goal now is to have a more stable, constant plasma reaction to show that such a thing can be done. After that, they hope to bring tokamaks out of research labs and into the world of commercial energy.

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