Seoul National University (SNU) and the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) researchers have managed to sustain a nuclear fusion reactor experiment at 100,000,000° C for 30-seconds, or 7-times hotter than the Sun’s core. It was conducted at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), which is one of several ‘artificial suns’ around the world that are the result of decades of research into the technology that merges atomic nuclei found in stars to generate vast amounts of energy capable of being transformed into electricity.
This experiment is being touted as a potential clean energy breakthrough since it requires no fossil fuels and leaves behind no hazardous waste, unlike current nuclear energy production methods. What’s next? The researchers are aiming to sustain 100,000,000° C for 300-seconds, as that is the maximum time frame to demonstrate steady-state operations before this ‘plasma can work forever’. Despite being called the Nuclear Football, this liquid-cooled gaming PC will not put anyone in danger.
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This team is finding that the density confinement is actually a bit lower than traditional operating modes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s compensated for by higher temperatures in the core. It’s definitely exciting, but there’s a big uncertainty about how well our understanding of the physics scales to larger devices. So something like ITER is going to be much bigger than KSTAR,” said the researchers.