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South Korea’s artificial sun has set a world record for reaching the highest heat in just 20 seconds.
You heard that right - their artificial sun, which is the nickname for a nuclear fusion reactor, could be the breakthrough they need in the search for unlimited clean energy.
It was back in 2022 when the reactor hit 100 million degrees in 20 seconds - which is unbelievable seven times hotter than the real sun.
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The hope is that the reactor will be able to produce the same amount of energy as more traditional methods but without the environmental consequences.
Unlike other ways, the artificial sun won’t emit greenhouse gasses or nuclear waste.
Speaking in a statement, Yoo Suk-jae, the president of the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy, said: “We usually say that fusion energy is a dream energy source – it is almost limitless, with low emission of greenhouse gasses and no high-level radioactive waste – [but the latest breakthrough] means fusion is not a dream.”
The plan is that by 2026, they’ll be able to maintain the heat from the reactor for up to 300 seconds, which is the equivalent of five minutes.
KSTAR director Yoon Si-woo added: “This is not the end of the story, we must move on to 300 seconds – 300 is the minimum time frame to demonstrate steady-state operations, then this plasma can work forever. If we can’t achieve that, we have to do something else.”
According to NewScientist, Dominic Power at Imperial College London said: “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.”
Lee Margetts at the University of Manchester also went on to explain: “It’s not physics, it’s engineering.
“If you just think about this from the point of view of a gas-fired or a coal-fired power station, if you didn’t have anything to take the heat away, then the people operating it would say ‘we have to switch it off because it gets too hot and it will melt the power station’, and that’s exactly the situation here.”
While Brian Appelbe at Imperial College London added: “The magnetic confinement fusion approach has got a pretty long history of evolving to solve the next problem that it comes up against.
“But the thing that makes me kind of nervous, or uncertain, is the engineering challenges of actually building an economical power plant based on this.”
