‘Small but impressive step’ on road to near-unlimited clean energy
South Korea’s KSTAR fusion nuclear power reactor has set a new fusion record after superheating a plasma loop to 100 million degrees Celsius for 48 seconds, scientists have announced.
The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) in Daejeon, central South Korea, broke the previous world record of 31 seconds, which was set by the same reactor in 2021.
The breakthrough is seen as a small but impressive step on the road to a source of near-unlimited clean energy.
Scientists have been trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion – the process by which the Sun and stars burn – for more than 70 years.
Nuclear fusion seeks to replicate the reaction that makes the Sun and other stars shine, by fusing together two atoms to unleash huge amounts of energy.
Often referred to as the holy grail of climate solutions, fusion has the potential to provide limitless energy without planet-warming carbon pollution. But mastering the process on Earth is extremely challenging.
The most common way of achieving fusion energy involves a donut shaped reactor called a tokamak in which hydrogen variants are heated to extraordinarily high temperatures to create a plasma.
High-temperature and high-density plasmas, in which reactions can occur for long durations, are vital for the future of nuclear fusion reactors, said Si-Woo Yoon, director of the KSTAR Research Center at KFE, which achieved the new record.
Sustaining these high temperatures “has not been easy to demonstrate due to the unstable nature of the high temperature plasma,” he said, which is why this recent record is so significant.
The biggest fusion project is the €20bn ($21.5bn) International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) nuclear fusion project at Cadarache in the south of France.
