China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), the "artificial sun", has successfully run at 100 million degrees Celsius for nearly 10 seconds, marking a major breakthrough, according to CCTV.
Nuclear fusion is seen as the ultimate solution to mankind's energy problems, and the problem now is that fusion technology is not mature enough.
One solution is superconducting tokamak, which uses magnetic constraints to control plasma heating to achieve ultra-high temperatures.
EAST is located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASHIPS) and is billed as an open test facility for conducting steady-state operations and ITER-related physics research by both Chinese and international scientists.
EAST is also known as the artificial sun because its goal is to provide energy for humanity through nuclear fusion like the Sun.
In 2017, for the first time in the world, EAST achieved a high confinement operation of 101.2 seconds of continuous plasma discharge at 50 million degrees, achieving a leap from the 60-second to 100-second order of magnitude.
At the end of 2018, it reached a core plasma temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius - that's more than six times hotter than the interior of the Sun - and heating power of 10 MW, enabling the study of various aspects of practical nuclear fusion in the process.
If the temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius can be maintained for a longer period of time, then mankind is really not far from solving the commercial application of nuclear fusion, but that day may be a long time away.
