China’s ‘artificial sun’ that’s SIX TIMES hotter than the real Sun

Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
48,426
1,668
113
There's one of these in Oxfordshire - which can get three times hotter than the Chinese one. It's the hottest place in the Solar System:

I’m in a room that, in normal circumstances, is not fit for human habitation. It features a number of big red buttons surrounded by illuminated yellow rings – just in case. “Push button to switch off Jet. Press only in case of extreme emergency,” the signs read, informatively.

This is the Torus Hall, a 40,000m3 space the size of an aircraft hangar with two massive fly-towers that house 1,100-tonne doors to seal the room off from an adjacent assembly hall. The walls and ceiling are two metres thick. The atmospheric pressure inside the hall is kept lower than pressure outside so that in the event of a breach, air would be sucked in rather than vented.

The hall houses possibly the closest thing on Earth to the centre of a star: the Joint European Torus, the world’s biggest fusion reactor at the Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire, UK. Jet is a tokamak, a circular structure shaped like a doughnut that employs powerful magnets to control that stuff of science fact and fiction: plasma.


JET's emergency "off" button. Just make sure it's the "right" emergency. Photo: SA Mathieson

The interior of the reactor can exceed 300 million°C, twenty times hotter than the centre of the Sun. Jet manages this through a variety of methods including microwaving, albeit at a different frequency to that used to excite the water molecules in your curry.


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/09/25/geeks_guide_jet/