EAST, also known as China’s Artificial Sun, maintained a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for 1000+ seconds reaching a temperature of 100 million °C.
- A tokamak is a machine that confines a plasma using magnetic fields in a donut shape to harness the energy of fusion.
Nuclear Fusion and Fission
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Significance of this achievement:
- Step towards fusion-based nuclear reactors which can act as alternatives to other sources of clean energy such as wind, solar etc.;
- can address world energy crisis & problem of climate change
Advantage of nuclear fusion
- High Energy Output – It produces greater amounts of energy than any other source.
- Abundant & affordable fuel –It uses cheap input materials, available in almost limitless supply.E.g., deuterium, tritium, hydrogen, Lithium
- Environmentally friendly – It has a zero-emission footprint and it does not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions or global warming
- Safe and Clean Process – Fusion reactors produce helium, an inert gas. They also generate and recycle tritium, a radioactive substance with a short half-life. As a result, fusion does not produce long-lived radioactive nuclear waste.
Challenges in nuclear fusion
- Extreme Temperature Requirement: Fusion requires temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, even higher than the Sun’s core.
- Plasma containment: At such high temperatures, matter exists only in the plasma state (atoms get split into positively and negatively charged particles). Keeping plasmas stable in order to extract energy is difficult.
- Magnetic Confinement: The plasma must be suspended within a confined space using strong magnetic fields to prevent contact with reactor walls.
