re posted from E.I.R Daily Alert Service
CGTN To Air Fusion Power Research as First in Science Series on ‘Decoding the Future’
May 19 (EIRNS)—CGTN is opening its series ‘Decoding the Future’ to air during the country’s Two Sessions—the meetings, starting May 21-22, of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—featuring China’s achievements in science and technology with the first episode entitled “The Power of Artificial Sun: Fusion.” In the program, CGTN anchor Zou Yue visits China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) based at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei. Zou interviews Xu Guosheng, the director of the Tokamak Physics Division at the Institute of Plasma Physics. “One of the two major difficulties in achieving nuclear fusion is that we have to maintain the plasma at a very high temperature for a long time. We have been holding the world record in this regard,” explains Xu. In 2018, EAST achieved a temperature of more than 100 million degrees Celsius—that is more than six times the temperature of the core of the sun—and EAST was able to it sustain the temperature for 10 seconds before shutting down.
Zou Yue also demonstrated some of the work being done at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER, in France, in which China has been very much involved, along with the other 34 countries working on the ITER tokamak. “Fusion is revolutionary,” Zou Yue comments. But, he says, “Even the most optimistic predict it will take decades before the technology comes to fruition. The Chinese took the challenge and want to join the world’s best minds for the endeavor. The appeal is obvious—it will serve 1.4 billion Chinese with clean and efficient energy for millennia and give the world a real holy grail. Fusion is a bold idea. It will elevate human energy use into new dimensions. … Like landing a man on the Moon, we choose to do it because it is hard, extremely hard. And everything good is hard to get.”
Source: EIR