Why temperature and duration both matter

A fusion reactor has to do two hard things at once: get the plasma hot enough that nuclei fuse, and hold it stable long enough to be a power source rather than a fireworks display. Records tend to fall on one axis at a time, which is why a single headline number can mislead.

EAST reaching 160 million °C and WEST sustaining a plasma for 1,337 seconds are both world records, but they answer different halves of the problem — peak temperature versus steady-state duration, often at different performance levels. A long pulse at a modest temperature and a brief flash at an extreme one are not the same achievement.

A real plant needs high temperature, long duration and good confinement together, continuously. That is why we keep temperature and duration as separate metrics on the tracker: progress on each is visible on its own terms, and you can see when a record pushes one axis without yet moving the others.