China has begun assembling a facility that is supposed to bring scientists closer to achieving controlled production of nuclear fusion energy.
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The experimental complex "BEST," dubbed the "artificial sun," has entered the main construction phase, according to the China Media Group (CMG).
The facility is being built in Hefei, Anhui Province, in eastern China. "BEST" is a superconducting tokamak designed to study burning plasma; it is a special chamber where scientists attempt to trap extremely hot plasma using powerful magnetic fields, replicating the process that has been occurring inside stars for billions of years.
Since last July, the main components of the complex have been transported to the construction site. More than half of the planned work has now been completed, and engineers have begun assembling the central part of the reactor.
Inside BEST, a vacuum chamber, a cooling shield, ring magnets, and other precision components are being installed. The vacuum chamber will be where the fusion reaction will take place, the cooling shield will protect the equipment from heat, and the superconducting magnets will create a magnetic field to trap the plasma.
The temperature of the plasma in such facilities reaches hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, so it cannot be allowed to touch the walls of the reactor, otherwise the facility would be damaged.
BEST's work is based on thermonuclear fusion, the process that takes place inside the sun, where light atomic nuclei combine to form heavier elements, releasing a huge amount of energy.
The facility plans to use a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. When they fuse, helium is formed, releasing energy that scientists hope to convert into electricity in the future.
For this reason, such projects are often called "artificial suns." The aim, of course, is not to create a copy of the star, but rather to try to reproduce the mechanism by which the sun releases its energy onto Earth.
The construction of "BEST" is planned to be completed in 2027. After that, the researchers hope to verify the possibility of maintaining the stability of the burning plasma, a state in which the fusion reaction itself helps to sustain the process.
Chinese specialists hope that by 2030 the project will be able to demonstrate the possibility of obtaining energy through the controlled fusion of deuterium and tritium.
There is still a long way to go before commercial fusion power plants emerge, but BEST could help scientists answer one of the most important energy questions of the modern age: Can an inexhaustible source of clean energy be created by relying on the interaction that takes place inside stars?
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