China’s experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST) — ran for 1,056 seconds at 70 million degrees Celsius, the farthest duration to date, by Xinhua News. Built by the China National Nuclear Corporation.

The ‘artificial sun’, called HL-2M, is a fusion reactor at the Southwestern Institute of Physics (SWIP), generating energy by magnetic fields to hydrogen compressing it till it creates a plasma at temperatures more than 150 million degrees C. 10 times hotter than the Sun, generating tons of energy while the atoms fuse. 

Plasma contained magnets and supercooling technology. It’s part of many magnetic confinement devices to produce thermonuclear fusion power. This thing generates a LOT of energy, we’re thinking, what’d happen if something goes wrong? Here’s the thing, the reactor cannot explode. A nuclear explosion cannot occur because the fuel is not compact enough to allow an uncontrolled chain reaction. 

It’s dubbed “artificial sun” as it mimics the nuclear fusion reaction that powers the real sun, using hydrogen and deuterium gasses. The main purpose is to create an enormous amount of green sustainable energy in the future.

Which will be done with nuclear fusion process. Nuclear fusion, a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles (neutrons or protons), releases very high levels of energy without generating large quantities of nuclear waste.

Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said “The recent operation lays a solid scientific and experimental foundation towards the running of a fusion reactor.” 

However, Lin said the technology is in the experimental stage, and it still needs at least 30 years for it to come out of the lab.