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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00:00This is a very exciting subject that you're going to be talking with me about today.
00:03China has made an artificial sun.
00:07Yes.
00:08I'm just like, I thought we had a sun already.
00:11I didn't know we needed a new sun,
00:12but I guess it's cool to have one because of all the solar implications, right?
00:16Yeah, it's always good to have a spare of anything, I guess.
00:19Sure, sure.
00:21So like the artificial sun is kind of China's buzzword for it,
00:25but it's actually a bit more of a mouthful what this thing stands for.
00:29It's called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak.
00:33It's a type of nuclear fusion reactor.
00:35It's not the first of its kind,
00:37but the reason why it's been making headlines last week and this week as well
00:41is it was able to maintain a temperature of 158 million degrees Fahrenheit,
00:45which is around five times as hot as the sun,
00:48for 1056 seconds, around just over 17 minutes, I believe.
00:54It smashed previous records.
00:56So hotter than the sun.
00:58Hotter than the sun.
00:59It needs to be hotter than the sun.
01:01Like we'll probably go into those reasons in a second,
01:04but it needs to be that hot.
01:06Really what it is is just like this big kind of like coils of plasma
01:10inside a donut shaped like reactor that's being contained by magnets,
01:16which hopefully one day we'll be able to make energy from.
01:20But this is very early stages right now.
01:22That's so exciting.
01:23So what is the difference between fission and fusion?
01:28Because I hear these two terms a lot and I'm not really a physics expert,
01:31but it's all very important stuff for keeping everybody alive, right?
01:35Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:36Well, actually one is quite good at also endangering life too.
01:40So fission is the one that like I'm referring to here.
01:44Fission is when we have like a load of very heavy kind of like elements
01:49like plutonium, like uranium.
01:50We fire a neutron into them and it splits them apart.
01:53And that splitting apart also releases a lot of energy.
01:56Now we use that in nuclear reactors to like make energy.
02:00We've also used it in the past in like bombs,
02:02in nuclear bombs, in thermonuclear bombs to cause immense devastation.
02:08But either way you look at it, fission is the splitting of the atom.
02:12Now fusion is something that we haven't ever been able to achieve
02:15in terms of like producing enough energy to be worth doing it yet.
02:19But it's the thing inside like stars.
02:22Like so fusion is the thing that happens inside the hearts of stars
02:25under immense pressure and like high temperatures.
02:29You get smaller elements like hydrogen that can form together
02:33to make heavier elements, helium and release energy as a consequence.
02:37Now the reason why that's way more exciting than fission
02:40is fission produces a load of dangerous like radioactive waste
02:43and byproducts and stuff.
02:45Fusion doesn't and fusion is also produces a lot more energy
02:48if you're able to get it going right.
02:50So that's the difference between the two.
02:53But now the more important question is,
02:55is that how does the fusion reactors work?
02:58Because like this is the actual thing that's happening here, right?
03:01Yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:03So on earth we're not really able to kind of like create the pressures
03:08that you would see at the heart of the sun.
03:09You need so much mass like squished together into doing that.
03:12But what we can do is we can make things very, very hot.
03:15In fact, we can make them way hotter than the sun.
03:17So what we do is we get all of this like plasma,
03:20we stick it inside a fusion reactor,
03:23we heat it up with magnets sending a current around it sometimes.
03:26That's one of the common ways.
03:27You can also use lasers to heat it up as well.
03:29But I think the kind of most common and most popular method right now
03:34is with magnets.
03:35You heat that plasma up so much until like what is inside that plasma
03:40tends to be isotopes of hydrogen combined together,
03:43release energy and that's how we're able to do it.
03:46The only problem right now and we're kind of,
03:49I imagine we're going to get onto this,
03:51but like the only problem we have right now is
03:53we put a load of energy in to make that happen.
03:56We can't get as much out.
03:57So we're not actually making energy on this thing.
03:59Oh goodness.
04:00So what are their plans for this?
04:03I guess it's to build bigger and bigger reactors,
04:07get more and more plasma inside,
04:10heat it up to hotter temperatures and find better ways to heat it up.
04:14So they're just trying to make the whole thing way more efficient,
04:17like in every way that you can look at it,
04:19but also just expand the base of like how much plasma
04:22you can have at these temperatures
04:24and then like just iterate and hope that that improves enough
04:27for us to have a good energy source.
04:29Because we can make fusion happen.
04:31Like fusion is a thing that we can do.
04:33It's just about the energy kind of optimization of it
04:36that we're really stuck on right now.
04:37I mean, you know, efficiency is helpful.
04:40And how does this compare to the other reactors
04:42that they've been having so far?
04:44So look, the East reactor is the most promising
04:47of the ones that we've seen.
04:48But then you could probably say that at any point in history, right?
04:50Like the current reactor is the most prominent,
04:52like promising one that looks like.
04:55But it's also, there is a really big reactor
04:57that's coming into play.
04:59It should be coming online in a few years.
05:02It's called the ITER reactor.
05:03They're building it at the moment in Marseille, in France.
05:05And it's an international collaboration.
05:08So every state in the European Union, the UK, Switzerland, China,
05:12India, and the US as well.
05:14So all of these states are getting together
05:18to build this one reactor.
05:19It's going to be the biggest one there is.
05:21And they're hoping, especially using this data from East,
05:24that they can make this process more and more efficient.
05:28But I can't say, and I don't think anyone else really can either,
05:31when it will become efficient.
05:32There's like a common joke among people who are into fusion,
05:36that fusion energy is only 30 years away and always will be.
05:40Like it's this idea that as advancements increase,
05:43we realize how much more we have to learn before we can do it.
05:46But there's a load of promising movements in this field.
05:50So it's exciting in that way, I guess.
05:51And this artificial sun that's hotter than the sun
05:55feels like it's like stepping stones to get there, right?
05:58Yeah, exactly, exactly.
05:59So any fusion reactor does need to be hotter than the sun to work
06:02because it doesn't have those pressures.
06:04But the fact that they're able to make this thing last
06:06as long as it did.
06:08They also broke another record with it back in May of last year.
06:13It ran for 101 seconds at 216 million Fahrenheit,
06:18which is the hottest that we've ever been able to make anything.
06:23And the core of the actual sun, by contrast,
06:25reaches temperatures of around 27 million Fahrenheit.
06:28So we're doing good at heating things up.
06:30We just need to find a way to get the energy out of that.
06:33Goodness, goodness.
06:34It's getting me all hot flashes just thinking about it.
06:37Well, this is very exciting news, Ben.
06:39I can't wait to see what more comes of it.
06:41Yeah, me too.
06:42I'll be following you keenly.
06:43All right, we'll look forward to that.
06:44Thanks again.
06:46Okay, thank you.