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Image tweeted by @GeniusBotx
Korea’s artificial sun has set a new fusion reactor world record after sustaining a plasma at the temperature of 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius) for 48 seconds, researchers declared.
The South Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor hit the last world record of 31 seconds, which was made by the same reactor in the year 2021.The achievement is not so big but great step on the long path to a source of near-unlimited clean energy.
Researchers have been attempting to tackle the power of nuclear fusion — the procedure from which stars blaze — for more than 70 years. By fusing hydrogen atoms to form helium by using too high temperature and pressures, so-called main-sequence stars change matter into light and heat, producing huge quantity of energy without making greenhouse gases or long-lasting radioactive waste.
But recreating the circumstances present inside the center of stars is not a easy thing. The most used design for fusion reactors — the tokamak — functions by sustaining plasma (one of the four states of matter, consisting of positive ions and negatively charged free electrons) and fixed it in the internal area of a donut-shaped reactor chamber with strong magnetic fields.
Holding the turbulent and superheated coils of plasma in place, sufficiently long for nuclear fusion to occur, however, has been a industrious procedure. Russian researcher Natan Yavlinsky structured the first tokamak in 1958, but no one is ever capable to make a reactor that is capable to throw out more energy as compared to the energy that it consumes.
(Image credit: Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE))
One of the major stumbling blocks has been how to manage a plasma that’s hot as required to fuse. Fusion reactors need effectively high temperatures — many times hotter than the sun — because they have to work at much lower pressures than where fusion generally happens inside the cores of stars. The core of the real sun, for instance, hit the temperature of around 27 million F (15 million C) but has pressures near about 340 billion times the air pressure at sea level on Earth.
Heating plasma this level of temperature is the relatively simple part, but getting a method to compound it so that it doesn’t be on fire through the reactor without also destroying the fusion procedure is technically difficult. This is mostly done with the help of lasers or magnetic fields.
Korea’s artificial sun
To increase their plasma’s heating time from the last world record, the researchers changed parts of their reactor’s structures, along with substituting carbon with tungsten to enhance the efficiency of the tokamak’s “divertors,” which carries out heat and ash from the reactor.
“Despite being the first experiment carried out in the environment of the new tungsten divertors, thorough hardware testing and campaign preparation permitted us to get consequences surpassing those of recent KSTAR records in a short time,” Si-Woo Yoon, the director of the KSTAR Research Center, said in a statement.
KSTAR researchers are desiring to push the reactor to super temperatures of 180 million F for 300 seconds by 2026.
The world record joins others created by competing fusion reactors all over the world, involving one by the U.S. government-funded National Ignition Facility (NIF), which triggered headlines after the reactor core shortly carried out more energy than inhaled.
