South Korea gave its artificial sun KSTAR an upgrade to withstand extreme temperatures. Following the upgrade, the device can now withstand temperatures six times hotter than the center of the star closest to us.
South Korea's Artificial Sun KSTAR Gets An Upgrade
With Korea's "artificial sun" receiving an exciting update to endure temperatures six times higher than the sun's center, sustained nuclear fusion may be one step closer to becoming a reality. With the installation of a new diverter by the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy, the KSTAR tokamak can now maintain high-ion temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius for extended periods.
One of the many fusion devices that use magnetic confinement and a donut-shaped device called a tokamak is Korea's artificial sun, dubbed KSTAR. The device contains a circular flow of super-hot plasma, a fourth state of matter formed when atoms are heated to such high temperatures that they split apart, producing a soup of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons, using a succession of strong magnets.
Normally, these positively charged ions would reject one another, but the sun's strong gravitational field creates tremendous pressure by pushing the ions together and dispelling repulsion. Since it is practically hard to reproduce this on Earth, the plasma must be heated to at least six times hotter than the sun's core.
Scientists have not yet been able to extract a significant amount of energy from a fusion reaction greater than what is required to create these temperatures. In addition to these enormous energy needs, the materials used in fusion reactors must resist extremely high temperatures.
The diverter, the reaction chamber's exhaust system, is the primary reactor component in direct contact with the plasma. This component needs to be the most resistant to the fusion plasma's high temperatures as a result.
The update will aid in advancing ITER, the largest fusion project in the world that involves 35 nations, including the US. The South Korean team nevertheless expects that their improvement would allow KSTAR to provide more precise data for designing and optimizing the world's largest tokamak machine, ITER, which is presently being built in France. It is anticipated that ITER will generate its first plasma by the end of 2025 and that full-scale operations will start in 2035.
Why Is KSTAR Called Artificial Sun?
Because KSTAR uses nuclear fusion, the same process that drives our star is called an artificial sun. It reached its first plasma in 2008 after its completion in 2007.
ITER, KSTAR is around one-third the size of the large experimental reactor called ITER being built in France. The two reactors are tokamaks, shaped like doughnuts, and used to perform nuclear fusion using plasmas or electrically charged gases heated to extremely high pressures.
KSTAR uses a diverter at the bottom of the tokamak to control reactor contaminants and exhaust waste gas. Since the diverter is a plasma-facing part, the whole force of the internal surface heat is applied to it when positioned inside the tokamak.
Scientists anticipate that by the end of 2026, the new diverter will enable 300-second plasma operations, compared to KSTAR's current capability of roughly 30 seconds.
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