{"id":29657,"date":"2026-07-20T10:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T14:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/?p=29657"},"modified":"2026-07-20T10:50:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T14:50:00","slug":"fire-more-than-three-times-hotter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/fire-more-than-three-times-hotter\/29657\/","title":{"rendered":"A fire more than three times hotter than the Sun’s core burned inside a doughnut-shaped machine in southern France for over 22 minutes, and the milestone just moved fusion energy measurably closer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture the Sun for a moment: a ball of fire<\/strong> so enormous that a million Earths would fit inside it, burning at temperatures the human mind can barely hold.<\/p>\n

Most of us grew up thinking of it as the ultimate heat source, the standard against which everything scorching gets measured.<\/p>\n

But something happened inside a doughnut-shaped machine in the south of France that scrambled that idea entirely.<\/p>\n

And the implications reach far beyond<\/strong> one laboratory, touching every power outlet, every river, every patch of sunlit ocean on Earth.<\/p>\n

A star is just a very patient pressure cooker<\/h2>\n

The Sun makes its energy the same way it always has: by crushing hydrogen atoms together under almost unimaginable pressure until they fuse into helium and release light and heat.<\/p>\n

At temperatures of 15 million degrees Celsius in the Sun’s core, hydrogen gas becomes plasma, the fourth state of matter. <\/p>\n

Plasma is not a solid, a liquid or a gas.<\/p>\n

It is a charged electrical soup<\/strong> of stripped atomic nuclei and free electrons, and it is what stars are made of.<\/p>\n

The Sun’s gravitational force confines those positively charged hydrogen nuclei, and the extreme heat causes them to move so furiously that they collide and fuse into heavier helium.<\/p>\n

The Sun has been doing this for about 4.6 billion years, burning 600 million tonnes<\/strong> of hydrogen every single second. <\/p>\n

The problem with copying a star on Earth<\/h2>\n

Researchers have dreamed of reproducing that reaction on Earth since the 1940s.<\/p>\n

A single gram of hydrogen isotopes yields the energy equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal, and the fuel is essentially limitless: the hydrogen needed for fusion can be extracted from seawater.<\/p>\n

That is the same ocean covering 71 percent of the planet and sheltering millions of species.<\/p>\n

The catch is that copying the Sun<\/strong> turns out to be brutally hard.<\/p>\n

Scientists pursuing controlled fusion must heat hydrogen plasma far hotter than the Sun’s core, because they cannot replicate a star’s immense gravitational pressure.<\/p>\n

Without gravity doing the squeezing, the plasma must be driven to temperatures the Sun itself never reaches in its core, then held in a magnetic cage rather than a stellar core. <\/p>\n

Every second of stable burning<\/strong> is a small engineering miracle.<\/p>\n

The doughnut that holds a fire no wall could touch<\/h2>\n

The machine physicists built for this job is called a tokamak, a ring-shaped chamber threaded with powerful magnetic fields.<\/p>\n

Its fields guide charged particles so they loop around the torus instead of striking the walls, meaning the plasma never actually touches the chamber.<\/p>\n

It floats inside an invisible magnetic cradle, spinning and roaring<\/strong> at temperatures that would vaporize any material on Earth in an instant.<\/p>\n

Keeping the plasma stable, while ensuring every surface can withstand its radiation without malfunctioning, once required the best minds in the world just to last a few seconds. <\/p>\n

Then came the question of whether it could burn for minutes at a time<\/strong>, long enough to actually power something real.<\/p>\n

22 minutes of borrowed sunlight<\/h2>\n

On February 12, 2025, the CEA’s WEST machine in Cadarache, southern France, maintained a plasma for more than 22 minutes<\/a>, smashing the previous record for plasma duration achieved with a tokamak. <\/p>\n

During the test, the plasma reached a temperature of 50 million degrees Celsius, around three times as hot as the Sun’s core. <\/p>\n

The machine did not just burn hotter than the star that warms every living thing on Earth; it held that fire for 1,337 seconds<\/strong> without the reactor’s internal surfaces breaking down.<\/p>\n

The previous record of 1,066 seconds had been set just weeks earlier by China’s EAST tokamak, meaning WEST topped it by 25 percent. <\/p>\n

The next step, the far larger ITER project, one of the most ambitious clean-energy collaborations ever assembled<\/a>, is being assembled in the same region of France and is designed to produce about 500 megawatts of fusion power from roughly 50 megawatts of heating input<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That ratio, ten times more energy out than goes in, is the holy grail<\/strong> the WEST record just moved measurably closer.<\/p>\n

What a star held in a bottle could mean for the living world<\/h2>\n

The hydrogen fuel for fusion comes from water, which means every ocean, lake and river on the planet is, in a sense, a potential fuel reserve<\/strong> that would last for millions of years.<\/p>\n

A working fusion grid would produce no carbon dioxide, no long-lived radioactive waste, and no air pollution, leaving rivers cleaner and skies clearer.<\/p>\n

The insects and native bees<\/a> that depend on stable seasons would have a measurably better chance of survival.<\/p>\n

Enormous engineering challenges remain between a 22-minute record and a power plant feeding a city grid, and long duration is only one part of the puzzle.<\/p>\n

Energy output at scale is another key indicator still to be conquered.<\/p>\n

But on a February morning in Cadarache, a machine the size of a small house held a piece of borrowed starlight<\/strong> for more than 22 unbroken minutes, and the Sun, for once, was not the most impressive furnace in the room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Picture the Sun for a moment: a ball of fire so enormous that a million Earths would fit inside it, burning at temperatures the human mind can barely hold. Most of us grew up thinking of it as the ultimate heat source, the standard against which everything scorching gets measured. But something happened inside a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":29656,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"fire more than","rank_math_title":"A fire more than three times hotter than the Sun's core burned inside a doughnut-shaped machine in southern France for over 22 minutes, and the milestone just moved fusion energy measurably closer","rank_math_description":"A fusion reactor in southern France held superheated plasma for 22 minutes, burning 3 times hotter than the Sun's core, and the implications for clean energy are extraordinary.","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}