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China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible
(www.the-independent.com)
Meanwhile USA is stealing Venezuelan oil. Good job everbody. 👍
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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Well. At least it will guarantee the USA's eventual fall from power.
Can you imagine the tech bros and anti-intectuals groveling to rejoin the scientific community?
Unfortunately science is not a morality structure.
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I really hate how so many of these articles feel like they need to dumb it down with this “artificial sun” imagery. It feels so condescending. I’d rather learn more about the latest progress with nuclear fusion
articles such as this one usually are optimized for their audience, you just aren't the audience. that's ok. I'm rarely the audience either :) a quick search should give you what you're looking for https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040
It isnt optimized. Its gibberish written just to give some weight to the headline. People do bad jobs at science popularization too.
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article didn't say anything. How does denser plasma achieve higher temperatures or other benefits? What advances did their denser plasma produce?
Right. where’s the actual content, the wording not treating us like idiots? What is the actual improvement?
There is no current actual improvement other than the possibilities. By cooling the plasma edge and using clean wall materials, they broke a theoretical density barrier that could potentially bring steady-state fusion closer to reality.
That's all it is. We're no closer to steady fusion, but now we know we can push past the Greenwald limit.
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Plasma is made from basicly over charging a gas with electrons the gas getting all pissy about having those electrons and starts dumping them. something do with elements wanting stability. In that process you get alot of heat out put. Now f you make it more dense I would conclude simply, you now have more ionized atoms in the plasma stream, meaning your plasma will be hotter if the stream will be the same size or if the plasma stream is shrunk but has the same number of ionized gas atoms, you have the same heat out put but in a smaller stream.
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I generally agree that science reporting treats everyone like children, but I really don't have a problem with this analogy. Stars are the only naturally occurring fusion we have to observe and compare it to. To me that makes sense.
Sure… but the metaphor glosses over the fact that they haven’t really told us anything of interest. It SOUNDS good, but there’s no way to tell how significant it actually is.
Fusion breakthroughs have sounded good since the 90s, but we’re still the proverbial 10 years away from anything useful.
Most Americans read at or below a 6th grade level
So we hear. But the world is not America and this is a British newspaper.
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If China has managed to do something that scientists genuinely thought was impossible why are there several nuclear fusion research facilities all over the planet? If it's impossible that seems like a bad use of resources.
I think maybe that scientists thought it was entirely possible, and that's why they were trying to do it.
Journalist reads "limit" and clickbaits it, typical
Scientist: "Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context."
Newspaper: "Scientist confirms that scientific discoveries are meaningless."
There are a bunch of things to research on fusion. Maybe they just thought this specific thing was out of reach, but were still trying to do other things.
Like the PvsNP computer science problem. Most computer scientists believe its impossible to make a polynomial algorithm that solves the traveling salesman problem, so most dont even try. But we dont know for certain that its actually impossible.
*Slaps on top of fusion reactor*
"You can boil so much water with this."
Higher density, yes, but at the cost of lower temperatures. So not as good. Nice but old new. With painfullll advertisement.
Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels.
The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal : Science Advances (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040 )in a study titled ‘Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST’.
In sum, these guys at EAST got the Greenwald limit elevated in their tokamak, which indirectly influences the Lawson criterion: nTTau, density * time at said density * plasma energy released. Lawson is the master finish line for measuring whether a fusion system can actually make more power than it consumes.
To date, when you cross the Greenwald limit, the man/woman in the operators seat should expect the plasma inside the device to become uncontrollable, hurting the reactor by touching the walls or instruments inside, a so-called "disruption". Only a few topologies like the stellerator can exceed the limit, and so far, only by 5x.
But here we have a way to exceed the limit in the much more researched tokamak. This research has positive impact for all but the weirdest/niche fusion devices.
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Only 75 more years to go!
If China's economic ascendancy happened 50 years sooner we would probably already have it. Democracies are allergic to massive capital investments that take decades to pay off.
Obviously the graph is very out of date, US funding is around 600 million 2012 dollars annually and China's is double that.
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Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.
US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.
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When your result breaks the laws of physics, you need to check your measurements and maths just to be sure. Better yet, have others do it for you.
This isn't a physics breaking finding. It's breaking the Greenwald density limit in tokamaks. Some other types of fusions reactors can go above this limit by 2-5 times.
In this case they're getting past that limit in the Chinese reactor. We had/have a limited understanding of exactly why this limit exists so hopefully these guy's research can help us figure out a way to get past the limit and achieve higher energy production.
Gotta love science reporters. "Thought to be impossible."
"A 747 jet took off from New York's Kennedy airport this morning, accomplishing a feat once thought to be impossible."
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"On this planet we obey the laws of physics!"
Is it only me that had the C&C Generals Nuke Cannon tagline going off in their heads saying BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN in a deliberate voice and a heavy Chinese accent?
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This diagram shows the LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) for various technologies - i.e. how much does one kWh of electricity cost if you divide the total number of generated kWh by the total cost of the power plant.
"utility-scale solar" means large-scale flat-area solar parks
But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
I doubt it; It's not only about technology costs but also about advantages like decentralization. If you can generate your own electricity in your own back-yard, you're much more independent than if you're dependent on large-scale fusion power. Because that will necessarily be very large-scale and centralized because nobody can set up a fusion reactor in their own back yard.
Solar is technically fusion though
Solar is Fusion as a Service or FaaS technology.
The sun is in the cloud(s)?
Technically, there's only two sources of energy in the universe: nuclear energy and the expansion of the cosmos.
Like, solar is fusion, ofc, the light coming from the sun. So is wind and water and bioenergy (indirectly). Geothermal is fission (heat comes from radioactive decay inside Earth).
But then there's another source of energy that nobody ever talks about: tidal power It works by converting the rise and fall of water with the tides into electrical energy. This energy ultimately comes from the moon orbiting around Earth, more precisely, its mechanical energy: The fact that the moon is distant from Earth is only because the universe expanded after the big bang. Had it not done this, the moon and earth would be located at the same location, and there would be no "orbiting" to extract energy out of :P
I just made a post about this here
but isnt it being centralized being the point? I have the (probably not so rare) tin foil theory that big energy spends a lot of money to dampen solar and other decentralized power generation. As a politician you have to ask yourself, do I get nice packages from big energy for not looking so closely when another forest is turned into a hole or do I hope that 20000 random people try to bribe me for something. In terms of money gain for a few big power plant is double plus good. Boring solar might be better for all of us, the rest, but not for the guys calling the shots. This all assumes of course that there is no empathy at all in the local legislation
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But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
Eventually. But, much like traditional fission power, you'll need a very large and complex piece of infrastructure to deliver it.
You won't be able to put a fusion plant in your basement like you can put solar on your roof.
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