Chinese scientists have successfully managed to create temperatures of 50 million degrees celsius – for 102 seconds, inside a nuclear fusion reactor. The breakthrough could pave the way for a future that does not depend on fossil fuels, but on alternative, sustainable clean energy sources. Press TV reports: The experiment was conducted in the doughnut-shaped chamber of a magnetic fusion reactor last week at the Institute of Physical Science in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, where nuclear scientists heated hydrogen up to a temperature of around 50 million degrees Celsius, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday. The reactor, officially known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), produced hydrogen plasma — the ionized gas consisting of approximately equal numbers of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons — and maintained its temperature for 102 seconds. A few days before the Chinese experiment, German scientists, in a similar experiment, used two megawatts of microwave radiation to heat hydrogen gas and create plasma. They managed to reach a temperature of 80 million degrees Celsius but could only maintain it for a fraction of a second. The officials at EAST hope to approximate the solar nuclear fusion conditions, which occur deep inside [...]