KSTAR, KFE’s fusion research device which it refers to as an “artificial sun,” managed to sustain plasma with temperatures of 100 million degrees for 48 seconds during tests between December 2023 and February 2024, beating the previous record of 30 seconds set in 2021.

Wait, but hold on…

The achievement was announced on Friday by Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China’s Anhui Province. The device, which replicates the atom-building process that occurs at the center of stars and gives them their luminosity and warmth, held plasma at a temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds and at the even hotter temperature of 160 million degrees Celsius for another 20 seconds.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a nuclear fusion reactor research facility, ran at 70 million degrees Celsius for as long as 1,056 seconds (17 minutes, 36 seconds), Xinhua reported.

I guess technically 120 million != 100 million…

It feels like there’s a lot more positive stories coming out about fusion lately :)

The goal is to get it as hot as McDonald’s coffee

In fusion reactors there is a lot of talk about the temperatures they reach and the time it manages to work, but all this corresponds more to propaganda publications. The real problem is achieving net energy production and at this point they are not much further ahead than the fusion reactor built by a boy in a garage a few years ago. Achieving nuclear fusion is not that complicated, it is complicated to do it by extracting more energy than invested and this is still a minimum of 10 years away.