In a major breakthrough for clean energy, China’s ‘artificial sun’ set a new record for plasma fusion on Thursday. 

The artificial sun, or the Experiential Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) is a nuclear fusion reactor research facility. The machine ran at 70 million degrees Celsius for 1,056 seconds (17 minutes, 36 seconds), the longest time of operation of its kind in the world, and five times stronger than the sun, according to media reports. 

The achievement was shared on Friday by a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP), who is in charge of the experiment conducted in Hefei, Gong Xianzu.

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“We achieved a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in an experiment in the first half of 2021. This time, steady-state plasma operation was sustained for 1,056 seconds at a temperature close to 70 million degrees Celsius, laying a solid scientific and experimental foundation toward the running of a fusion reactor,” he said, reported Xinhua. 

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“The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental foundation towards the running of a fusion reactor,” he added. 

Institute of Plasma Physics director Song Yuntao said, “Five years from now, we will start to build our fusion reactor, which will need another 10 years of construction.” He believes that they will be able to construct the power generator and start generating power by 2040, according to a report in The Sun. 

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“We have comprehensively validated the technology, driving it a major step forward from basic research to engineering applications,” he added.

The project involved over 10,000 Chinese and foreign scientific researchers and an expenditure of around £701 million. 

The EAST harnesses extremely high temperatures to boil hydrogen isotopes into a plasma, fusing them together and releasing energy. 

The facility has been used since 2006 by scientists from all around the world to conduct fusion-related experiments, according to the report by The Sun.