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, but 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, but 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, for 1,056 seconds.
00:51That's around just over 17 minutes, I believe.
00:54It smashed previous records.
00:56So hotter than the sun.
00:58Hotter than the sun.
01:00It needs to be hotter than the sun.
01:01Like, we'll probably go into those reasons in a second, but it needs to be that hot.
01:06Really what it is is just, like, this big kind of, like, coils of plasma inside a donut-shaped, like, reactor
01:13that's being contained by magnets, which hopefully one day we'll be able to make energy from.
01:20But this is very early stages right now.
01:21That'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, but it's all very important stuff for keeping everybody alive, right?
01:35Yeah.
01:36Yeah, 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, like plutonium, like uranium.
01:50We fire a neutron into them, and it splits them apart, and 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, in 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 in 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 under immense pressure and, like, high temperatures.
02:29You get smaller elements, like hydrogen, that can form together to make heavier elements, helium, and release energy as a consequence.
02:37Now, the reason why that's way more exciting than fission is fission produces loads of dangerous, like, radioactive waste and byproducts and stuff.
02:45Fusion doesn't, and fusion 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.
02:53Now, the more important question is, is that how does the fusion reactors work?
02:58Because, like, this is the actual thing that's happening here, right?
03:02Yeah.
03:02Yeah, yeah.
03:03So on Earth, we're not really able to kind of, like, create the pressures that 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.
03:21We stick it inside a fusion reactor.
03:23We heat it up with magnets, sending a current round 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 the kind of most common and most popular method right now is with magnets.
03:35You heat that plasma up so much until, like, what is inside that plasma tends to be isotopes of hydrogen combined together, release energy.
03:44And that's how we're able to do it.
03:46The only problem right now, and we're kind of, I imagine we're going to get onto this.
03:51But, like, the only problem we have right now is we 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, get more and more plasma inside, heat 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, like, in every way that you can look at it, but also just expand the base of, like, how much plasma you can have at these temperatures.
04:24And then, like, just iterate and hope that that improves enough for 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 that 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 that they've been having so far?
04:44So, look, the East reactor is the most promising of the ones that we've seen.
04:48But then you could probably say that at any point in history, right?
04:51Like, the current reactor is the most prominent, like, promising one that it looks like.
04:55But it's also, there is a really big reactor that's coming into play.
04:59It should be coming online in a few years.
05:01It's called the ITA reactor.
05:03They're building it at the moment in Marseille, in France.
05:06And it's an international collaboration.
05:08So, every state in the European Union, the UK, Switzerland, China, India, and the US as well.
05:15So, all of these, like, all of these states are getting together to 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, that they can, like, make this process more and more, like, efficient.
05:28But I can't say, and I don't think anyone else really can either, when it will become efficient.
05:33There's, like, a common joke among, like, people who are into fusion, that fusion, like, fusion energy is only 30 years away and always will be.
05:40Like, it's the idea that, like, as advancements increase, we realize how much more we have to learn before we can do it.
05:46But there's a load of promising kind of 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 feels like it's, like, stepping stones to get there, right?
05:57Yeah, exactly.
05:59Exactly.
05:59So, any fusion reactor does need to be hotter than the sun to work because it doesn't have those pressures.
06:04But the fact that they're able to make this thing last as long as it did, they also, like, they also broke another record with it back in, like, May of last year.
06:13It ran for 101 seconds at 216 million Fahrenheit, which is, like, it's, like, the hottest that we've ever been able to make anything.
06:22And the core of the actual sun, by contrast, reaches 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.
06:44We'll look forward to that.
06:45Thanks again.
06:46Okay.