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South Korea ’s " hokey sun " has set a new fusion record after superheating aplasmaloop to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit ( 100 million degrees Celsius ) for 48 seconds , scientist have denote .
The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research ( KSTAR ) reactor broke the late world record of 31 instant , which was arrange by the same reactor in 2021.The discovery is a low but impressive step on the long road to a source of near - limitless clean energy .
A view inside the KSTAR reactor chamber.
Scientists have been hear to harness the power of nuclear fusion — the process by which genius burn — for more than 70 years . By immix hydrogen molecule to make helium under extremely high pressures and temperatures , so - called primary - succession stars convert matter into light and heat , generating tremendous amounts of energy without producinggreenhouse gasesor long - lasting radioactive wastefulness .
But repeat the conditions notice inside the pith of stars is no simple task . The most common design for unification reactor — the tokamak — works by superheating blood plasma ( one of the four state of matter ofmatter , consisting of positively charged ions and negatively charged free negatron ) and trap it inside a donut - shaped reactor chamber with powerfulmagnetic field .
Keeping the turbulent and superheated spiral of plasma in place long enough for nuclear fusion to happen , however , has been a painstaking process . Soviet scientist Natan Yavlinsky designed the first tokamak in 1958 , but no one has ever managed to create a nuclear reactor that is able-bodied to put out more get-up-and-go than it take in .
A photo of South Korea’s KSTAR nuclear fusion reactor.
Related : Nuclear fusion reactor in UK sets new world record for energy output
One of the principal stumbling block has been how to palm a plasma that ’s hot enough to fuse . unification reactors require very gamy temperatures — many sentence hot than the sun — because they have to engage at much lower pressures than where nuclear fusion naturally takes place inside the cores of stars . The pith of the existent sun , for example , reaches temperatures of around 27 million F ( 15 million C ) but has pressure roughly adequate to 340 billion times the atmosphere air pressure at sea degree on Earth .
preparation plasma to these temperature is the relatively easy part , but finding a way to corral it so that it does n’t burn through the nuclear reactor without also ruining the fusion process is technically knavish . This is usually done either with lasers or magnetized playing area .
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To extend their blood plasma ’s burning time from the previous record - break discharge , the scientists tweaked look of their reactor ’s innovation , including exchange carbon paper with tungsten to better the efficiency of the tokamak ’s " divertors , " which extract heat and ash from the reactor .
" Despite being the first experiment run in the environment of the young tungsten divertors , thoroughgoing hardware examination and campaign planning enable us to achieve results surpassing those of previous KSTAR track record in a short period , " Si - Woo Yoon , the director of the KSTAR Research Center , tell in a statement .
KSTAR scientist are aiming to push the reactor to sustain temperature of 180 million F for 300 endorsement by 2026 .
The platter joinsothers made by competing spinal fusion reactorsaround the world , including one by the U.S. government - funded National Ignition Facility ( NIF ) , whichsparked headlinesafter the reactor core briefly put out more vigour than was put into it .
