China Is Keeping Something 7X Hotter Than The Sun Alive

By Insane Curiosity

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China has built a 582-ton magnet for a fusion reactor, and its job sounds impossible: hold plasma seven times hotter than the core of the Sun without ever letting it touch the walls. Inside a tokamak, nothing solid can contain the fuel. At more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, steel would not simply melt. It would vaporize. So instead, the machine uses magnetic fields to hold the plasma in a doughnut-shaped loop, floating inside a vacuum chamber, separated from the metal by empty space. This is the cage with no bars. But why does a reactor on Earth need to be hotter than the Sun? The answer is one of the strangest facts about fusion. The Sun has gravity and time. Its enormous mass squeezes hydrogen nuclei together for billions of years. A machine on Earth has neither. So we compensate with heat. China’s EAST reactor has already held plasma steady for 1,066 seconds — seventeen minutes and forty-six seconds. That may not sound long compared to a power plant, but for fusion it is

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