Korea's 'artificial Sun' reactor has made headlines this week after it was officially sustained at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius.
The ion temperature at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research device was over 100 million degrees Celsius.
Hardware limitations stopped the reaction after 30 seconds.
The ultimate goal of KSTAR is to make nuclear fusion power a reality.
The temperature achieved by the reactor is more or less equivalent to 100 million degrees Celsius and can be seen in the video below.
Yong-Su Na, one of the KSTAR research rs, said that longer periods should be possible in the future after the upgrade to the device.
If we can get it to work as intended, this is an exciting achievement that could transform the way we power our lives.
This advance by KSTAR isn't a brand new record, as some media are saying.
We reported on this breakthrough back in 2020 when KSTAR announced it. Their paper on the research has just been published in the journal Nature.
In the years since, the KSTAR team has broken their own record, and China's 'artificial Sun' known as EAST has also done so.
The fusion machine of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was able to stay on it for 101 seconds.
The KSTAR achievement is worth celebrating and sharing.
The threshold of 100 million degrees hadn't been reached for more than a decade.
The radio station. The institute of fusion energy is in Korea.
The technologies required for long operations of 100 million-degree plasma are the key to the realization of fusion energy according to a nuclear physicist.
A critical component of a commercial nuclear fusion reactor in the future, the KSTAR's success in maintaining the high-temperature plasma for 20 seconds will be an important turning point in the race for securing the technologies.
The Internal Transport Barrier modes inside the KSTAR were upgraded in order to jump to 20 seconds. The modes help to control the confinement and stability of the fusion reactions.
The KSTAR is a tokamak-style reactor, similar to the one that recently went online in China, which combines atomic nuclei to create huge amounts of energy.
The nickname for these fusion devices is "the Sun" because they use the same fusion reactions that occur on the Sun.
It has been difficult to maintain high enough temperatures for a long time for the technology to be viable. Nuclear fusion is going to need to break more records in order to work as a power source, with little more than water and a source of hydrogen.
Progress has been encouraging despite all the work that needs to be done to get these reactor to produce more energy than they consume. For a period of 300 seconds, the engineers at KSTAR want to have reached 100 million degrees.
Young-Seok Park, a nuclear physicist, said that the 100 million degree ion temperature achieved by the KSTAR device demonstrated the unique capability of the device.
The research was published in a journal.
December 2020 is when parts of this article were published.
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