From The Register:
Heats hydrogen more than three times hotter than the sun
Days after the German chancellor triggered the creation of hydrogen plasma for less than a second, China has announced that one of its fusion reactors has broken the record for plasma creation.
On Friday the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that its boffins had created the 102-second plasma burn in its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) at Hefei, capital city of east China's Anhui Province.
During the experiment, sensors recorded the plasma's temperature at 50 million degrees Celsius (90 million degrees Fahrenheit). That's more than three times as hot as the core of the sun, which NASA estimates is a toasty 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit).
The Chinese experiment is a major step forward in fusion research, but the Middle Kingdom magicians have much bigger plans. They hope the EAST instrument will eventually be able to sustain plasma for 1,000 seconds at twice the current temperature....MORE
