It sounded too good to be true 鈥� and it was. When the Chinese news agency Xinhua announced on 29 September that researchers had initiated thermonuclear fusion in a brand-new reactor, news organisations worldwide ran with the story. 鈥淒uring the experiment, deuterium and tritium atoms were forced together at a temperature of 100 million Celsius,鈥� Xinhua reported.
鈥淔usion always causes a lot of media hype because people really want it to happen鈥�
There was just one problem: nothing of the kind took place. 鈥淭he reports were totally wrong,鈥� Jiangang Li, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei, Anhui province, told 麻豆传媒 The Chinese researchers had, for the first time, managed to inject a plasma of ionised hydrogen into the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a doughnut-shaped machine designed to confine super-hot plasmas magnetically, and the plasma sustained currents of 250,000 amps for up to 3 seconds. But no attempt was made to introduce deuterium or tritium into the plasma, so no fusion can have occurred.
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Not everyone swallowed the stories. 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 believe the online reports,鈥� says Chris Carpenter at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion research centre in the UK. 鈥淔usion is always something that causes a lot of media hype because people really want it to happen.鈥�
