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Armed with a significant breakthrough by a Chinese research team, they claim to have created the world's first power plant capable of converting fusion energy into electricity without disrupting the power system.
Quoted from the South China Morning Post, the China-made Sun, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), will generate massive amounts of heat when it is completed around 2035, with a peak power output of up to 2 gigawatts.
This development comes months after China's Tokamak (EAST) superconducting follow-up experiment, the HL-2M fusion energy reactor has been running for 1,056 seconds at a temperature of 70 million degrees Celsius.
"Converting heat to electricity is a challenge in itself as the reactor has to take a 20-minute break every two hours," said Xiang Kui, chief engineer of thermal systems at China Energy Engineering Group, Guangdong Electric Power Design Institute in Guangzhou.
Xiang and his colleagues stated in a report published in the domestic peer-reviewed journal "Southern Energy Construction" that these frequent disturbances can create energy jets that will cause major damage to the power grid.
Today the whole world is pursuing nuclear fusion technology. Besides China, there is also a facility in France called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), where this experiment takes place with the help of a world consortium with the European Union, US, Russia, and even China as members. They hope to make a breakthrough in the second half of the century.
At the same time, Chinese researchers have stated that the Beijing government expects to start using commercial fusion power plants around 2050. But fusion power plants require a unique design with significant buffer zones to protect the current energy infrastructure from deadly shocks.
Countries like the US and UK are not too far behind in this regard. In February this year, the JET laboratory in the UK broke its world record for the amount of energy that can be extracted by combining two types of hydrogen. In five seconds, the test generated 59 megajoules (11 megawatts of power).
Previously, there was also a South Korean artificial sun which in 2020 set a new world record. Nuclear energy fusion that operates for 20 seconds with a temperature of more than 100 degrees.
