Several countries have been trying for years to obtain an energy source as unlimited and “clean” as that of the Sun, and reproduce it in a sustained way and on a large scale, a race in which South Korean scientists announced that they managed to keep a “Sun stable for 20 seconds. artificial “to more than 100 million degrees inside a nuclear fusion device, setting a world record by beating its UK predecessor by ten seconds.
On November 24, the KSTAR Research Center, belonging to the Korean Institute of Fusion Energy (KEF), announced that, in a joint investigation with Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University in the United States, it achieved continuous operation of plasma for 20 seconds, with ion temperature above 100 million degrees, which is one of the core conditions of nuclear fusion in the KSTAR 2020 plasma campaign.
The specialists consider it an achievement to extend the operating time of the plasma and reach the world record, in 2019 the Joint European Torus, a fusion reactor located in the United Kingdom, achieved 10 seconds under the same conditions and KSTAR itself had not exceeded eight seconds in 2019, Engadget recalled.
In its 2018 experiment, KSTAR reached the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time (retention time: approximately 1.5 seconds), according to a dispatch from the DPA news agency.
To recreate the fusion reactions that occur in the Sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device such as KSTAR to create a plasma state where ions and electrons separate, and ions must be heated and held. at high temperatures.
The record
Until now, there have been other fusion devices that have briefly handled plasma at temperatures of 100 million degrees or more, but none broke the barrier of maintaining operation for more than 10 seconds, it is the operating limit of the normal driving device and it was difficult to maintain a stable plasma state in the fusion device at such high temperatures for a long time.
In its 2020 experiment, KSTAR improved the performance of the internal transport barrier (ITB) mode, one of the next-generation plasma modes of operation developed last year, and succeeded in maintaining plasma state for a long period of time. , exceeding the existing limits of ultra-high temperature plasma operation.
KSTAR began operating the device last August and aims to achieve 300-second continuous operation with an ion temperature above 100 million degrees by 2025. (Télam)
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