Why did China build an artificial sun?

 

man has always worshiped the sun it's perfectly logical too as the warm ball of light and heat sitting high in the sky fuels life on this planet by producing the equivalent of about a trillion nuclear bombs per second enough to power human civilization for 500 000 years every second so why has china decided

 to build their very own artificial sun

 the need cleaner better more it's no secret the world stores of subterranean fossil fuel stores are running out the industrial age has seen an explosion in the global human population and those people all need food on the table lights on in the house and be able to get from a to b burning coal pumps 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year and in such a relatively short time in our existence we have effectively altered the climate of our planet it's no small thing there is an increasingly urgent need for a cleaner alternative to conventional fossil fuel-based energy generation wind solar geothermal hydro tidal all excellent methods to harness power from nature but the yield just isn't there to replace current infrastructure and support the needs of the human race the answer lies in the atom e equals m c squared it's an equation known by many but understood by few basically energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light square in layman's terms there is an almost unfathomably large amount of energy contained within matter just waiting to be extracted the history the good the bad and the ugly picture a golden god in all their blazing glory dragging a fiery orb across the heavens from dawn until dusk the sun rising and setting is a concept that amazed early man and this description of a powerful solar deity tasked with ensuring the sun rises each new day could easily be from many religions around the globe the greek helios the roman apollo the norse soul the hindu surya first mankind wanted to split the atom we succeeded though arguably with mixed results the tremendous amount of energy released can then either be harnessed or unleashed on one hand nuclear power stations supply over two dozen countries with electricity by turning water into steam powering turbines with a process that splits a heavy uranium atom into smaller atoms called nuclear fission on the other hand the atomic boogeyman has haunted us on numerous occasions out of those two dozen countries who use enriched uranium as the fuel for steam turbines nine have developed nuclear weapons in fact russia and the usa account for 93 of the world's 15 000 strong armaments too many then there are the catastrophes the meltdowns that put the fear of god in mankind and make us question whether potentially rendering our planet too radioactive to inhabit is a worthy risk for quote-unquote cleaner energy these range in severity from mild to world-changing a cooling malfunction caused the molten core of the number two reactor at pennsylvania's three mile island released radioactive gas during 1979 in such a small amount that it didn't affect background radiation levels or harm nearby residents a warning but prices averted when an earthquake hit the japanese fukushima plan in 2011 external power was cut off to the cooling system designed to slow the nuclear reaction the water from the subsequent 50-foot tsunami rendered the backup generators useless overheating the uranium fuel and causing hydrogen explosions in three of the cores radioactive material leaked into the air ground and sea with 100 000 people permanently displaced from their homes within the exclusion zone then there is the big one the accident that still haunts us today 1986 chernobyl arrogant hubris human error and an inherent design fault pushed the reactor to its absolute limits and well past the threshold of failure the core exploded releasing 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the hiroshima sending a toxic cloud of dust across europe for 10 full days to date only 50 deaths are attributed to the worst nuclear disaster in human history out of the million strong cleanup team it's estimated around 15 percent have succumbed to terminal illness as a result of their exposure the death rate incidence of cancer and number of birth defects in newborn children skyrocketed in the ukraine and russia and remains over 30 years later millions of lives forever changed with the compromised core of chernobyl still eating through the concrete base of the power plant making the area uninhabitable for at least the next 100 years there has to be a better way than atomic fission a process that creates terrible products that remain toxic for tens of thousands of years and radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years the why isn't it obvious the logical way forward is nuclear fusion but first let's take a minute to think about what energy is in its most basic form energy is storage and transfer let's use fossil fuels as an example the storage part comes from the decomposed prehistoric plant and animal matter stored underground as fossil fuels it's the same concept as the electrical potential within a battery the transfer comes when those fossil fuels are burned to create electricity the stored chemical energy in coal is changed to heat which turns water into steam to power turbines the kinetic energy moving the fins is then converted back into electricity by the relationship between magnetic and electric fields the electrons flow through power lines into your home where they are again changed into light and heat as you cook on a stove top sit at your computer or turn on a light bulb it's all energy just stored in different forms and transformed into what you needed to be the downside is pollution greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and radioactive waste from nuclear fission these two methods have the best output but are the worst for our environment conversely renewable green energy is

 fantastic for the health of the planet

 but the yields are too small to sustain us the sun is the key the original producer of all the energy transferred via sunshine and then stored on earth by using neutron heavy isotopes of hydrogen such as deuterium and tritium the same nuclear fusion reaction occurring in the sun on a grand scale can be mimicked on a smaller skin the smaller atoms can be forced together to create harmless healing generating a huge amount of energy in

 the form of heat during the process

 the watts isn't it awesome it's only been very recently that china have successfully powered up their fusion reactor affectionately known as the artificial sun for the first time this is huge the hl2m takamak reactor

 is currently the world's largest and

 most advanced device used for experimental nuclear fusion research that is crucial in unlocking both a powerful and clean

 burning energy source for the future

 playing god has become possible by way of a powerful magnetic field used to fuse and contain the hot plasma while withstanding temperature of up to 270 million degrees fahrenheit not only could they house a mini sun in this field but they could theoretically make a sun with a core 10 times hotter than our own this plasma is an ionized gas that conducts electricity normally the weak atomic force that prevents two atoms from combining into a larger atom is just too strong for fusion to occur naturally the positively charged protons in each atomic nucleus repel each other in a similar way that you can force the north poles of a magnet together in order for the phenomenon to occur you need two things high temperature and high pressure in order to get the hydrogen isotopes excited enough to overcome their electrical repulsion they need to be heated to 170 million degrees fahrenheit where they enter this higher plasma state and lose their electrons the sun achieves this due to its large mass and huge gravity compressing the core mass here on earth we use microwaves lasers and ion particles to achieve the same temperatures next up is pressure as previously stated the sun is huge and its gravitational force is enough to squeeze the hydrogen together to form helium this is the tricky part as we need to use extremely powerful magnetic fields to contain and condense the plasma to act as the catalyst to initiate the fusion reaction the chinese plan to use this otherworldly device in collaboration with the international thermonuclear experimental reactor currently being constructed in france when it's completed in 2025 it will

 become the new king of nuclear fusion

 the biggest and most powerful in the world the future best of both worlds currently this reactor uses double neutron deuterium to triple neutron tritium fusion reaction deuterium to deuterium fusion requires

 much higher temperatures and is seen as the holy grail of nuclear fusion for a very simple reason it's easy to make deuterium can be

 very easily extracted from seawater

 while tritium can only be bred from

 lithium a notoriously finite resource

 the end game is to produce renewable power from a controlled fusion reaction using nothing but seawater the added benefit is that a pure deuterium fuel source increases energy yield generally speaking one out of every 5 000 hydrogen atoms in seawater is deuterium theoretically one gallon of seawater could produce as much energy as 300 gallons of gasoline it's the best of both worlds high electricity production without the massive detriment to the environment