China’s ‘artificial sun’ project just got a whole lot hotter, scientists say
- New facility in Sichuan province will enable researchers to recreate the ‘extreme environments’ necessary to harness nuclear fusion
- Plasma-generating machine capable of producing temperatures 13 times as hot as the sun
A new research facility that will enable Chinese scientists to carry out vital experiments in the development of a nuclear fusion reactor – or so-called artificial sun – is set to open later this year, according to the company behind the project.
The new centre, in Chengdu, capital of southwest China’s Sichuan province, will have at its heart an “HL-2M machine”, which is capable of generating plasma – another name for hot gas – at temperatures of up to 200 million degrees Celsius, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) said in a statement on its website on Thursday.
The ability to generate such intense heat is essential to the fusion process, which is how the sun produces energy, though it operates at a temperature of a mere 15 million degrees.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), currently under construction in southern France, is designed to operate at up to 150 million degrees.
The development of the Sichuan facility is another step forward in the nation’s push to build the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor by 2021, CNNC said.