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posted by martyb on Monday April 29 2019, @01:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the too-cheap-to-meter dept.

China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) recently became the first facility in the world to generate plasma temperatures of 100 Million degrees Celsius (180 Million Fahrenheit).

For comparison, the temperature at the core of the Sun is a paltry 15 Million degrees Celsius (27 Million Fahrenheit)

EAST is part of the multi-billion dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project which seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a power source. ITER is funded by the EU, USA, India, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and China.

China's quest for clean, limitless energy heats up

Wu Songtao, a top Chinese engineer with ITER, conceded that China's technical capabilities on fusion still lag behind more developed countries, and that US and Japanese tokamaks have achieved more valuable overall results.

But the Anhui test reactor underlines China's fast-improving scientific advancement and its commitment to achieve yet more.

China's capabilities "have developed rapidly in the past 20 years, especially after catching the ITER express train," Wu said.

In an interview with state-run Xinhua news agency in 2017, ITER's Director-General Bernard Bigot lauded China's government as "highly motivated" on fusion.

China is also planning a separate fusion reactor that it hopes will be able to generate commercially viable fusion power in about thirty years and has already promised six billion yuan ($890 million) to that project.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 29 2019, @01:17PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 29 2019, @01:17PM (#836244)

    China, more than the US or Europe, serves the target market. You can have a yacht built in China to higher standards than in a U.S. shipyard, they know how to do it and will do it - for the actual price it costs to do it, which would be just marginally less than you would pay a U.S. shipyard... so few people bother. China will also build yachts to much lower standards than U.S. shipyards - again for the actual price it costs to do so, and these are the ones which are popular for export because they look very similar to the better made yachts and can be sold for marginally less in the U.S. market, with a much bigger sales commission cushion built in - so, of course US yacht sellers push those.

    Same goes for WalMart level products - the Chinese can, and occasionally do, build good stuff for a good price, but with suppliers like WalMart demanding ever increasing margins year after year, the quality goes down until you have 0% Aloe content in your Aloe Vera gel, because there's no other way to achieve the cost targets.

    In other words: China exports to us the quality level we demand, in a very real sense we: the post Great Depression penny pinching nation, get the products we deserve.

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