China Nuclear Fusion: China has taken a big step forward in its nuclear fusion project. According to Xinhua News Agency, China has completed testing a superconducting magnet weighing 582 tons. This magnet is 21 meters long and is considered to be the largest fusion reactor magnet ever made. It has been created by the Institute of Plasma Physics i.e. ASIPP under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei city. This is a toroidal-field magnet, which is one of the most essential parts of a fusion reactor. Scientists around the world consider fusion to be the best way to generate electricity in the future, and China’s achievement shows the rapid progress being made in this direction. This magnet is designed for China’s next generation project BEST, and not for the existing EAST tokamak.
Why is this magnet so special
In the fusion reactor, hydrogen is heated so much that its temperature reaches more than 100 million degrees Celsius, that is, about six times hotter than the center of the sun. At this heat, no material can directly touch the plasma, so powerful magnets create a magnetic field and hold the plasma in the air in a donut-shaped tokamak chamber. This magnet is made of superconducting technology, that is, it is cooled at very low temperature, due to which it has almost zero resistance to electricity and it can carry very large current even at low energy.
According to Chinese scientists, this magnet is about 1.3 times bigger than the magnet of the international ITER project being built in France and can store three times more magnetic energy. It took six years to build, involving innovations in areas such as conductor manufacturing, structural engineering, ultra-cold temperature technology and safety systems, and dozens of patents were obtained during this period.
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Future planning and benefits of fusion
China’s EAST Tokamak is called “Artificial Sun” and it has made many world records in maintaining plasma in extremely hot condition for a long time, but it is just a research machine. The real objective will be fulfilled by the BEST project, which will eventually try to generate real electricity from the continuously burning plasma. According to China’s plan, the construction of BEST reactor is expected to be completed by 2027, and if all goes well, a demo of generating electricity from fusion can be shown by around 2030.
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