China successfully activated its most advanced experimental nuclear fusion reactor on Friday. That reports state agency Xinhua. China is thus taking a major step forward in the search for energy with low CO2 emissions.
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China, which has the highest emissions of any country in the world, created its growth largely on the basis of fossil fuels. Every year, China also continues to build very polluting new coal-fired power plants.
But China is also the country that invests the most in renewable energy worldwide. In its quest for a low-emission energy source, it experiments with nuclear fusion. Proponents consider it the energy source of the future because it is infinite, like the sun, and produces neither waste nor greenhouse gases.
China therefore has the Tokamak HL-2M reactor, the most efficient in the country, in the province of Sichuan. It is a magnetic chamber that generates phenomenal heat, with the aim of fusing atomic nuclei. Inside the reactor, the temperature can reach more than 150 million degrees Celsius, Xinhua says. That is ten times the heat at the core of the sun. The reactor will provide “vital technical support to China” for the sake of ITER, the international research project involving experimental fusion reactors, engineer Yang Qingwei said, according to Xinhua.
Soviet Union
Research into nuclear fusion is not new. The magnetic chambers were originally conceived in the Soviet Union. Their name, ‘tokamak’, comes from Russian. There are also ‘tokamaks’ built in Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea. This nuclear ‘fusion’, the principle of which was already used for the atomic bomb, is not to be confused with the ‘fission’ of atoms, on the basis of which traditional nuclear power plants operate.
The difficulty is to sustainably maintain temperatures and hold them in resistant materials. France started construction of a giant fusion reactor for the ITER project in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance in July. The aim is to generate 150 million degrees Celsius, but the first tests are not expected before 2025.
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