Researchers at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) said they were able to heat hydrogen to nearly three times the temperature at the core of the Sun, and keep it there for 102 seconds. Institute of Physical Science

The march to sustainable nuclear fusion appears to have made serious progress, after a Chinese research group said it sustained a superheated plasma gas at 49.99 million degrees C for more than a minute.

Researchers at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) said they were able to heat the gas to nearly three times the temperature at the core of the Sun, and keep it there for 102 seconds.


The experiment involved using a ring-shaped reactor at the Institute of Physical Science in Hefei, China, to heat up and control hydrogen gas to extreme temperatures, and hold it in place away from the walls of the ring using high-powered magnets.

Doing this is extremely difficult, and previous experiments have only managed to do so for less than a minute, at most. The Chinese team have been able, it seems, to demonstrate new techniques for increasing that time significantly, and hope to increase even that record by a factor of 10 in the next few years.

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In itself the process demonstrated by the EAST team does not generate power, but it is regarded as a critical technical piece in the puzzle. Nuclear fusion would involve using massive amounts of energy to creation a fusion reaction, and sustaining that reaction for long enough to get more energy out than was put in at the start. Doing so requires controlling the hydrogen plasma, which is the Chinese team's goal.

The implications of true nuclear fusion remain extraordinary; the ultimate goal is a new form of clean, cheap, sustainable nuclear power, which would not require the use of extremely rare elements. In theory it would represent an escape from the reliance on fossil fuels and older, more dangerous and dirty nuclear fission technology.

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The Chinese breakthrough comes less than a week after a team at the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald, Germany, were able to heat hydrogen to even more intense temperatures -- up to 100 million degrees C -- but for much shorter periods of time. The German government has dedicated more than £1 billion to the search for nuclear fusion, even while the ultimate goal is still seen as being decades away.


In terms of raw temperatures, 50 million degrees C is a mere mild breeze. The hottest-ever man-made temperature -- and as far as we know, the hottest spot in the universe -- reached 5.5 trillion degrees C, and was created in 2012 inside the Large Hadron Collider. While only sustained for a fraction of a second, that experiment was enough to smash particles apart and create quark-gluon plasma, an exotic form of matter that existed immediately after the Big Bang.

According to the South China Morning Post, the Chinese team at EAST said their new record was still below their own targets, which is to sustain a temperature of around 100 million degrees C for 1,000 seconds. Doing so would be an astonishing achievement, though would still leave humanity years away from a commercially viable fusion solution.

Fortunately, there is international collaboration -- chaotic, but real -- on fusion as well as competition: China is a member of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project, currently under construction in France, which aims at producing a reactor capable of 500 megawatts of fusion output for 400 seconds. The EAST team has said their data could be of use for that effort, though it may still be decades away from completion.