China's Artificial Sun
The EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) nuclear fusion reactor maintained a temperature of 158 million degrees Fahrenheit for 1,056 seconds. The achievement brings scientists a small yet significant step closer to the creation of a source of near-unlimited clean energy.
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00:00 This is a very exciting subject that you're going to be talking with me about today.
00:03 China has made an artificial sun.
00:07 Yes.
00:08 I'm just like, I thought we had a sun already.
00:11 I didn't know we needed a new sun, but I guess it's cool to have one
00:13 because of all the solar implications, right?
00:15 Yeah, it's always good to have a spare of anything, I guess.
00:18 Sure, sure.
00:20 Hopefully.
00:21 So like the artificial sun is kind of China's buzzword for it,
00:25 but it's actually a bit more of a mouthful.
00:27 What this thing stands for.
00:29 It's called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak.
00:33 It's a type of nuclear fusion reactor.
00:35 It's not the first of its kind, but the reason why it's been making headlines
00:39 last week and this week as well is it was able to maintain a temperature
00:43 of one hundred and fifty eight million degrees Fahrenheit, which is around
00:46 five times as hot as the sun for one thousand and fifty six seconds.
00:51 Around just over 17 minutes, I believe.
00:54 It's smashed previous records.
00:56 So hotter than the sun.
00:58 Hotter than the sun.
00:59 It needs to be hotter than the sun.
01:01 Like we'll probably go into those reasons in a second, but it needs to be that hot.
01:06 Really what it is is just like this big kind of like coils of plasma
01:10 inside a donut shaped like reactor that's being contained by magnets,
01:15 which hopefully one day we'll be able to make energy from.
01:20 But this is very early stages right now.
01:22 That's so exciting.
01:23 So what is the difference between fission and fusion?
01:28 Because I hear these two terms a lot and I'm not really a physics expert,
01:31 but it's all very important stuff for keeping everybody alive. Right.
01:35 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:36 Well, actually, one can one is quite good at also endangering life, too.
01:40 So fission is the one that like I'm referring to here.
01:43 Fission is when we have like a load of very heavy kind of like elements
01:49 like plutonium, like uranium.
01:51 We fire a neutron into them and it splits them apart.
01:53 And that splitting apart also releases a lot of energy.
01:56 Now we use that in nuclear reactors to make energy.
02:00 We've also used it in the past in like bombs and nuclear bombs
02:04 and thermonuclear bombs to cause immense devastation.
02:07 But either way you look at it, fission is the splitting of the atom.
02:12 Now, fusion is something that we haven't ever been able to achieve
02:15 in terms of like producing enough energy to be worth doing it yet.
02:19 But it's the thing inside like stars.
02:22 Like so fusion is the thing that happens inside the hearts of stars
02:25 under immense pressure and like high temperatures.
02:29 You get smaller elements like hydrogen that can form together
02:33 to make heavier elements, helium and release energy as a consequence.
02:37 Now, the reason why that's way more exciting than fission is fission
02:41 produces a loads of dangerous like radioactive waste and byproducts and stuff.
02:45 Fusion doesn't.
02:46 And fusion is also produces a lot more energy if you're able to get it going.
02:50 Right. So that's the difference in the two.
02:53 But now the more important question is, is that how does the fusion reactors work?
02:58 Because like this is the actual thing that's happening here, right?
03:01 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
03:03 So on Earth, we're not really able to kind of like create the pressures
03:08 that you would see at the heart of the sun.
03:09 You need so much mass like squished together into doing that.
03:12 But what we can do is we can make things very, very hot.
03:15 In fact, we can make them way hotter than the sun.
03:17 So what we do is we get all of this like plasma.
03:20 We stick it inside a fusion reactor.
03:23 We heat it up with magnets, sending a current around it sometimes.
03:26 That's one of the common ways.
03:27 You can also use lasers to heat it up as well.
03:29 But I think the kind of the the kind of most common
03:32 and most popular method right now is with magnets.
03:35 You heat that plasma up so much until like what is inside
03:39 that plasma tends to be isotopes of hydrogen combined together, release energy.
03:44 And that's how we're able to do it.
03:46 The only problem right now, and we're kind of I imagine we're going to get onto this,
03:51 but like the only problem we have right now is we put a load of energy
03:54 in to make that happen.
03:56 We can't get as much out.
03:57 So we're not actually making energy on this thing.
03:59 Oh, goodness. So what are their plans for this?
04:02 I guess it's to build bigger and bigger reactors,
04:07 get more and more plasma inside, heat it up to hotter temperatures
04:12 and find better ways to heat it up.
04:14 So they're just trying to make the whole thing way more efficient,
04:17 like in every way that you can look at it, but also just expand
04:20 the base of like how much plasma you can have at these temperatures
04:23 and then like just iterate and hope that that improves enough for us
04:28 to have a good energy source, because we can make fusion happen.
04:31 Like fusion is a thing that we can do.
04:33 It's just about the energy kind of optimization of it
04:36 that we're really stuck on right now.
04:37 I mean, you know, efficiency is is helpful.
04:40 And and how does this compare to the other reactors that they've been having so far?
04:44 So the East reactor is the most promising of the ones that we've seen.
04:48 But then you could probably say that at any point in history, right?
04:50 Like the current reactor is the most prominent, like promising one that looks like.
04:54 But it's also there is a really big reactor that's coming into play.
04:59 It should be coming online in a few years.
05:02 It's called the ITER reactor.
05:03 They're building it at the moment in Marseille in France.
05:05 And it's the it's a it's an international collaboration.
05:08 So every state in the European Union, the UK, Switzerland, China, India
05:13 and the US as well.
05:15 So all of these like in all of these states are getting together
05:18 to build this one reactor.
05:19 It's going to be the biggest one there is.
05:21 And they're hoping, especially using this data from East,
05:23 that they can make this process more and more like efficient.
05:28 But I can't say and I don't think anyone else really can either
05:31 when it will become efficient.
05:33 There's like a common joke among like people who are into fusion.
05:36 The fusion like fusion energy is only 30 years away and always will be
05:40 like this idea that it like as advancements increase, we realize how
05:44 how much more we have to learn before we can do it.
05:46 But there's a load of promising kind of movements in this field.
05:50 So it's exciting in that way.
05:51 And this and this artificial sun that's hotter than the sun feels like
05:55 it's like stepping stones to get there, right?
05:58 Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
05:59 So any fusion reactor does need to be hotter than the sun to work
06:03 because it doesn't have those pressures.
06:04 But the fact that they're able to make this thing last as long as it did,
06:07 they also like they also broke another record with it
06:10 back in May of last year.
06:13 It ran for one hundred and one seconds at two hundred and sixteen million
06:17 Fahrenheit, which is like it's it's like the hottest
06:21 that we've ever been able to make anything.
06:23 And the core of the actual sun, by contrast, reaches temperatures
06:26 around twenty seven million Fahrenheit.
06:28 So we're doing good at heating things up.
06:30 We just need to find a way to get the energy out of that.
06:33 Goodness, goodness.
06:34 It's getting me all hot flashes just thinking about it.
06:36 Well, this is very exciting news, Ben.
06:39 I can't wait to see what more comes of it.
06:41 Yeah, me too. I'll be following it keenly.
06:43 All right. We'll look forward to that. Thanks again.
06:45 OK, thank you.
06:47 Yeah.
06:47 So.
06:48 So.
06:49 So.
06:50 So.
06:51 So.
06:52 So.
06:53 So.
06:54 So.
06:55 So.
06:56 So.
06:57 So.
06:58 (heart beating)
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