At present, two primary techniques being used for the nuclear fusion are the inertial confinement approach and the tokamak reactor. Scientists at the Institute of Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangsu province have revealed that their tokamak reactor’s plasma achieved a temperature of 50 million Kelvins (or, 49.999 million degrees Celsius) within 102 seconds of initiating the experiment.

This was around three times more than the temperature of the sun, nearly 15 million Kelvins at the core of the sun. The temperature achieved was nearly equivalent to a thermo-nuclear explosion of mid-density.

The nuclear reactor, called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), contains three peculiar characteristics- a non-circular cross-section, fully superconducting magnets, and fully actively water cooled plasma facing components. The hydrogen gas generated during the experiment was maintained for the record-breaking time period of 102 seconds.

The experiment was targeted at duplicating the process of nuclear fusion that takes place deep inside the solar core. A high-temperature ionized gas, called plasma, was produced by the EAST reactor by the fusion of atoms that resulted in the generation of extreme amounts of energy. This process is completely opposite of the nuclear fission process, which involves the splitting of atoms for the production of energy.

The success of this experiment has led China right to the front of the competition happening globally for exploiting unconventional, artificial solar energy to substitute the use of fossil fuels and conventional nuclear fission reactors. Nuclear fusion has been found to be an important source of alternate means of energy that will be clean, produce plentiful energy and is generated via self-sustaining process.

For the last 50 years, atomic researchers and physicists have been struggling to harness energy from nuclear fusion. However, advancement in this field has been slow.