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With tight research budgets, is there room for the eternal promise of fusion?
Moving beyond the country's, and the world's, existing energy menu, which is still by far dominated by abundant and relatively cheap fossil fuels, is hard, whatever your preferred path.
To use a sports analogy (and setting aside, for the moment "stasists"—locked into the status quo), the debate tends to break down to those pushing the ground game, investing in deployment of today's non-polluting sources like wind and solar, and those pursuing tough, but potentially game-changing advances in technologies like nuclear power. For decades, nuclear fusion has been the equivalent of the Hail Mary pass.
At the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), the KSTAR tokamak recommenced operations in December after a major upgrade to replace the…
KSTAR aims for longer plasmas
At the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), the KSTAR tokamak recommenced operations in December after a major upgrade to replace the device's carbon divertor with a tungsten divertor.
According to an article on the KFE website, the original carbon divertors could take a thermal load of 5MW/m², whereas the tungsten divertor can take 10MW/m². The upgrade is critical to the goal of sustaining a 100-million-degree plasma for 300 seconds by 2026. Data from the operational campaign will be directly relevant to ITER, which will operate a tungsten divertor under similar plasma conditions in terms of shape and structure.
This testing campaign will continue through February 2024. Read more about the plans in this article in English on the KFE website, or in Korean in the Chosun Biz.