It marks a major advance in achieving sustainable fusion power, which promises nearly unlimited clean energy by mimicking the natural reactions that occur inside the Sun. A team from Seoul National University and the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy experimented with the reactor at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), succeeding in achieving an improved technique to contain the plasma in the reactor core. The “artificial sun” is one of many around the world that are the culmination of decades of research into the technology, which essentially fuses atomic nuclei found in stars to produce vast amounts of energy that can be converted into electricity. A similar facility in China was able to operate at a slightly lower temperature for more than 17 minutes last year. At 70 million degrees Celsius, the plasma was still five times hotter than the real Sun. The process has been hailed as the “holy grail” of clean energy, as it requires no fossil fuels and leaves behind no hazardous waste unlike current nuclear power generation methods. “We usually say that fusion power is a dream energy source – it’s almost limitless, with low greenhouse gas emissions and no high-level radioactive waste – [but the latest breakthrough] it means that fusion is not a dream,” said Yoo Suk-jae, president of the Korea Fusion Energy Institute. At the start of the year, the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy set a goal of achieving plasma temperatures above 100 million degrees for 50 seconds by the end of 2022, with an ultimate goal of 300 seconds by 2026. “This is not the end of the story, we have to go to 300 seconds – 300 is the minimum time frame to show steady-state operations, then this creature can work forever,” said KSTAR director Yoon Si-woo . “If we can’t achieve that, we have to do something else.” A study detailing the research, titled “A stable high-temperature plasma fusion regime facilitated by fast ions,” was published in the scientific journal Nature this week.
