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China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds (www.livescience.com)

submitted 6 months ago by Deceptichum@quokk.au to c/world@quokk.au

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The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) nuclear fusion reactor maintained a steady, highly confined loop of plasma — the high-energy fourth state of matter — for 1,066 seconds on Monday (Jan. 20), which more than doubled its previous best of 403 seconds, Chinese state media reported.

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[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 31 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This isn't sustained fusion, just to be clear - this is a big deal because they've managed to develop a method of keeping the plasma from grounding out for ~16 minutes, and plasma modeling is one of the key areas for fusion to become a viable power source (that is, in a tokamak. WX-7, another ITER reactor, is doing it's own very cool thing and will likely break this record by 2x within a couple months, but stellerators aren't tokamaks and this is still super important work!). But they aren't getting power out of it, we're still decades away from that (and the US just dropped... er... all of their funding for science)