Lead:
Most people have dreamed of a sun that not only illuminates but also makes people carefree, and China is planning to build a sun that will boost human energy development in the next decade.
The "artificial sun" is far from empty talk, and mainland scientists are already standing on a platform high enough that it is really possible to put this greatest feat into practice, and it will undoubtedly be hailed as the "holy grail of energy" in the future.
What is an "artificial sun".
The new generation of nuclear fusion furnaces is the real "artificial sun".
The term "artificial sun" should be a science fiction experience in the minds of Chinese people, and even in the 70s, the Americans promised to develop an artificial sun within 10 years.
In fact, the term "artificial sun" comes from the grandmother of the child of World War II.
At that time, after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military launched a series of heavy artillery bombardments on the Japanese Navy, and American warships and planes also dropped some rockets composed of ammonium bromide and magnesium powder to lure enemy planes, and at the same time illuminate the ships under the Japanese Navy at night.
The Americans call this series of high-tech weapons "little sun" or "artificial sun."
But these weapons of war are much inferior to artificial suns, and the new generation of nuclear fusion furnaces is the real "artificial sun".
The discovery of nuclear fusion can be traced back to the late forties of the last century, around 1948, Marshall and Sloanson of the United States led a research team in the laboratory to study and explore fusion reactions, they used a mixture of liquid lithium and deuterium, through electromagnetic fields to eliminate the coulombic repulsion between deuterium, and consume less energy to fuse deuterium to produce helium and new binding energy.
The move raised expectations for how spectacular the fusion experiment could be in the future, and in October of that year, the experiment was demonstrated in the United States in a shocking way.
Scientists in the United States have praised fusion reactions as a good solution to the fusion of deuterium and tritium, and they have also reveled in the method of creating deuterium foam, believing that it is the best way to generate nuclear fusion.
They believe that the fuel made in this method can be wrapped in a specific liquid lithium, so that the volume of deuterium foam can be easily reduced, and the density of liquid lithium itself is moderate, and the outer layer is easy to make as a solidification layer, which can well isolate the heat between tritium and deuterium, so that it can consume very little energy.
In December of the same year, Soviet scientists Davydov and Fazlakhkin found that the energy produced by the fusion fusion of deuterium and tritium was unusually huge, and they believed that as long as they could master the key technology of fusion, the problem would be solved, which really made the "artificial sun" possible.
New energy core 150 million °C.
Nuclear fusion is a very promising energy source, and one can use the fusion reaction of light elements and light nuclei to release the energy between the synthesized heavy elements and heavy nuclei.
This is a new energy source, and it is also the only way for human beings to generate electricity in outer space, because there is no oxygen in outer space, so fossil fuels cannot be used to produce energy, but they can use nuclear fusion to fuse helium, hydrogen and other elements to release energy.
The energy of nuclear fusion is so vast that it can easily surpass the energy of nuclear fission, and the radioactive material it produces is far less dangerous than the fission reaction.
At present, due to the imbalance in technological development in the world, the research on nuclear fusion in various countries is at different stages, and the limits of technology are also different.
Among them, in 1988, the TJ-II nuclear fusion device of the Federal Institute of Nuclear Fusion Science in the United States was considered to be the most powerful magnetic confinement fusion device in the world at that time, which could reach 40 million Kelvin electron temperatures, but this was only the progress made in magnetic confinement fusion, and there was still a long way to go to truly establish an "artificial sun".
Confinement fusion devices first use magnetic fields to control the ions that cause a temperature of 400,000 Kelvin, and in order to reach a temperature of 150 million Kelvin, a stronger magnetic force is required, a technique that is very difficult even in magnetic confinement fusion.
However, at the end of the 20th century, the continent began to systematically carry out the research of fusion devices, and in 2016, mainland scientists also achieved the maximum temperature of 150 million Kelvin electrons on the Oriental Light device, which is another milestone in the fusion reaction community.
In 2016, mainland scientists also held an international nuclear fusion conference to showcase the research results and development prospects of the continent, attracting experts and scientists from many countries to participate in this experiment.
It was this experiment that broke the world's highest temperature limit that had not been broken for 40 years, making the continent rank among the world's leading in the field of nuclear fusion research, creating a new research direction, and being regarded as the "new Beidou" of nuclear fusion research.
The "artificial sun" is a matter of course.
Subsequently, in 2019, the mainland officially launched the "Chang'e-4" deep space probe, and the lander carrying the "Luna-2" successfully landed on the far side of the moon, with the original intention of exploring the human outer space environment.
But mainland scientists have found that sufficient quantities of helium can be stored in such an environment, and by bringing helium back to Earth and using it for nuclear fusion reactions, the continent's long-term energy shortage in the future can be solved.
Chang'e-4 successfully recovered 44 days of helium in 2019, and this exploration has made the development of an artificial sun and nuclear fusion energy more natural.
In 2020, mainland scientists announced that a large amount of helium had been found under the "Aral Sea" in southwest China, and it is said that there is not a lot of helium here, only tens of billions of cubic meters.
This helium element is enough to generate electricity for two hundred years, which is also 700 times the amount of helium currently used by humans, which also brings a glimmer of hope to human power generation.
Moreover, mainland scientists have not stopped researching in this field, and have launched a new generation of nuclear fusion "artificial sun" magnetic confinement fusion device, which will undoubtedly provide a new generation of clean energy for mankind in the next ten years, which will also be a contribution of the continent to the world.
Epilogue:
The emergence of artificial suns can undoubtedly reduce the pressure of human beings on the earth's hormones to a large extent, and can prevent greenhouse gas emissions to a large extent, so artificial suns are undoubtedly a kind of energy "holy objects".
Moreover, it can solve the problem of energy contention on the earth to a certain extent, especially when the continent has abundant helium resources, and the continent will become one of the pillars of solving the global energy crisis in the future.