The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) device designed by China replicates the nuclear fusion process carried out by the sun.Recently, China’s “artificial sun” set a new record after it ran at 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds, according to the state media.Today, we conduct fusion reactions in a machine called the.It requires a lot of excess energy in order to keep the fusion reaction going once it has started.It’s also quite difficult to find materials that can withstand the reaction.
Experimental fusion reactors do exist –– but they consume way more power than they produce, which basically defeats the purpose of generating power using fusion.The sun is a natural fusion reactor which makes up for its measly 15 million degrees with the intense pressure created by its core's gravity.For fusion to occur on Earth, we need a temperature of at least 100 million degrees Celsius-six times hotter than the core of the sun.Since fusion doesn’t produce runaway chain reactions the way fission can, there’s practically no risk of a meltdown in the case of nuclear fusion.Furthermore, unlike fission, nuclear fusion does not produce any radioactive waste it only produces helium atoms as a byproduct, which we can actually use to our benefit in various ways.In contrast, the fuel necessary for fission (uranium, plutonium or thorium) is very hard to get – and highly expensive.On top of that, fusion is carried out by using deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) as fuel, which is quite abundant in nature.Firstly, nuclear fusion requires less fuel than fission. Fusion is much better than fission in a number of ways.Why is fusion a better option than fission to generate power? This is the energy that produces heat inside a reactor, which in turn is used to generate steam, and ultimately creates electricity.Some of this energy is from radiation, but the biggest source is kinetic energy.When these nuclei are split, a huge amount of energy is released.Inside each uranium fuel pellet, there are millions of uranium nuclei.Fission is the process of splitting a nucleus in two.Nuclear fusion powers our sun and harnessing this fusion energy could provide an unlimited amount of renewable energy.Nuclear fusion is defined as the combining of several small nuclei into one large nucleus with the subsequent release of huge amounts of energy.The megajoule of energy released in the experiment is indeed impressive in fusion terms, but in practice, this is equivalent to the energy required to boil a kettle.The team noted that they were able to achieve a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules.These pellets containing deuterium and tritium fused and produced more energy.
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