Energy security

China Is Building an Artificial Sun

China has announced advancing plans for its nuclear fusion device known colloquially as an “artificial sun.” They say the device, which will reach temperatures of up to 360 million degrees Fahrenheit, is actually more like 12 artificial suns combined. The extremely high temperatures lead to the titular effect: literally, the nucleuses of two or more atoms are fused, and the process generates energy.

The experimental device, the HL-2M Tokamak, is the largest of its kind to date. A tokamak is a specific kind of fusion reactor that’s been theorized about since the 1950s, when Soviet scientists coined the term as a shortening of the Russian for “toroidal magnetic confinement.” The name is perfectly descriptive. A tokamak is a torus—the math term for a donut—in which extremely heated plasma is trapped and pressed into making chemical reactions.