Historic record: an “artificial” sun has reached a …

Advanced Superconducting Tokamak Research (KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as korean artificial sun, established the new world record keeping the plasma at high temperature for 20 seconds with an ionic temperature of over 100 million degrees, almost seven times more degrees than the solar core itself reaches.

In the past, the Common European Torus, a fusion reactor located in the United Kingdom, carried out 10 seconds under the same conditions and have KSTAR did not exceed 8 seconds in 2019. In its 2018 experiment, KSTAR first achieved the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees (retention time: about 1.5 seconds).

Project leader Si-Woo Yoon explained in a memo released by Korea’s National Scientific and Technological Research Council that “Kstar’s success in keeping plasma at high temperature for 20 seconds will be a major turning point in the race to secure technologies for long-term high performance plasma operation, a critical component for commercial nuclear fusion reactor in the future“.

How it works?

To recreate the fusion reactions that occur in the sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device like KSTAR to create a plasma state where the ions and electrons separate, and the Ions must be heated and stored at high temperatures.

Until now, no other device had crossed the barrier to maintain this operation for more than 10 seconds. In his 2020 experience, KSTAR improved the performance of Internal Transport Barrier Mode (ITB), one of the next-generation plasma modes of operation developed last year, and managed to maintain plasma state for a long period of time, exceeding the existing limits of ultra-high temperature plasma operation.

South Korea’s artificial sun, “instead of using fossil fuels or nuclear fission (the splitting of the atom’s nucleus) to generate energy, uses nuclear fusion (the union of the nuclei of atoms) “, detailed the American media Syfy. “The nuclear fusion it is possible when the nuclei of two low proton counting elements join together to form the nucleus of a heavier element, which can release more energy“, He explained.

Investigation

The research is a joint project of Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University in the United States, and KSTAR is expected to join the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in the near future, a program involving the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, Japan and India, which aims to create the largest tokamak (device whose objective is to obtain the fusion of particles plasma) that ever existed and operate it between 2030 and 2035.

“Currently, South Korea is also building the huge tools to assemble the ITER parts, and will also be in charge of producing the heat shields for the giant magnets in the reactor,” Syfy said.

But the main thing seems to have been the improvement of the ITB mode: “Internal transport barriers are areas of the plasma in the center of a reactor where it is possible to shut down or at least reduce the turbulence. Putting a tokamak in ITB mode contains the plasma and improves stability “and it helps” to extend the time that the plasma stays hot.

“The success of the KSTAR experiment in prolonged high temperature operation by overcoming some drawbacks of ITB modes brings us closer to the development of technologies for the realization of nuclear fusion energy“said Yong-Su Na, professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, SNU, who participated in the research.

The final meta of the project is to be able to successfully maintain continuous operation during 300 seconds at temperatures above 100 million degrees, a goal they hope to achieve in 2025.