China broke the record by keeping the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) by achieving plasma temperature at 120 million Celsius for 101 seconds and 160 million Celsius for 20 seconds, a major step toward the test run of the fusion reactor.
The Tokamak devise[sic] is located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is designed to replicate the nuclear fusion process that occurs naturally in the sun and stars to provide almost infinite clean energy through controlled nuclear fusion, which is often dubbed the "artificial sun."
The achievement broke a previous record of maintaining the plasma temperature at 100 million C for 100 seconds. According to Li Miao, director of the physics department of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, it is a milestone in reaching the goal of keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time.
"The breakthrough is significant progress, and the ultimate goal should be keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time," Li told the Global Times, adding that the next milestone might be to maintain the stability for a week or more.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05 2021, @08:56PM (8 children)
Possibly, but industrial espionage may also play a large role too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05 2021, @09:37PM
Do they use PowerPoint?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aliks on Saturday June 05 2021, @10:08PM (3 children)
Hmmm,
Not sure how industrial espionage allows you to become a world leader in any technology. Surely it just means you keep a short distance behind the people you copy from.
But the real problem for the spying narrative is that there are no real "industrial secrets". For sure there is expertise, but you can get all the documentation you like about some piece of technical wizardry, but no matter how many times you read it, you won't become a tech wizard. Its incredibly rare that a significant advance is so mysterious that a competent expert cannot work out how to replicate.
To err is human, to comment divine
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Saturday June 05 2021, @11:31PM (2 children)
If several of your peer or near nations are leaders in different technologies, and you steal from all of them, now you're the overall world leader.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:11AM (1 child)
Even if you're the leader in everything, you should steal to stay on top. The steal never ends.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:52AM
STOP THE STEAL!!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dltaylor on Saturday June 05 2021, @11:06PM (2 children)
When you are demonstrably the leader in some form of technology, from whom do liberate data (which wants to be free)?
The "West", in general, and the United States, in particular, have "leaders" (civilian and government), and Intellectual Property laws serving them, more interested in lining their own pockets than this type of project, and millions of useless drones that fantasize about being one of them by producing some silly "app".
Collectively, we lost the lead in tech, including biomedical, back in the early 1970s. We just haven't noticed it until now.
One way to fix it would be to scrap all the IP laws on tech, invest more in the universities post-grad programs, and let private enterprise do the productizing and production, rather like NASA doing the research and publishing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:01AM (1 child)
> Collectively, we lost the lead in tech, including biomedical
Bullshit. Who has it then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:28AM
Maybe the places that didn't ban research because they feel like stem cells are icky.