Nuclear fusion reactor in South Korea runs at 100 million degrees C for a record-breaking 48 seconds

[Judi Lynn]

By Ben Turner published 3 hours ago

The experimental fusion reactor sustained temperatures of 180 million degrees Fahrenheit for a record-breaking 48 seconds.



The inside of a tokamak fusion reactor. (Image credit: Monty Rakusen/Getty Images)

South Korea's "artificial sun" has set a new fusion record after superheating a plasma loop to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius) for 48 seconds, scientists have announced.

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor broke the previous world record of 31 seconds, which was set by the same reactor in 2021.The breakthrough is a small but impressive step on the long road to a source of near-unlimited clean energy.

Scientists have been trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion — the process by which stars burn — for more than 70 years. By fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium under extremely high pressures and temperatures, so-called main-sequence stars convert matter into light and heat, generating enormous amounts of energy without producing greenhouse gases or long-lasting radioactive waste.

South Korea's "artificial sun" has set a new fusion record after superheating a plasma loop to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius) for 48 seconds, scientists have announced.

More:
https://www.space.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor-south-korea-runs-48-seconds?utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=MANUAL

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Wonderful achievement. I wonder when such technological developments will led to better and cleaner

power plants (and from what I hear, unlimited power too). Battery technologies have also been improving too, so on many fronts, the energy barriers (creating it) are slowly being overcome. Of course, w/ a final development of such tech, getting it to the marketplace would be the next (and expensive probably) step.

[NNadir]

2. Only 31,410,592 seconds to go each year and we're saved.

I was young when I first started hearing of fusion "breakthroughs," and they've been announced regularly all through the long period in which I grew to an old man.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. When I was young I heard about pocket phones and gene therapy and encyclopedias by wire. . . . nt

[NNadir]

4. And the point is what? That phones and gene therapy are more difficult than fusion energy?

One thing about analogies is that they are very, very, very, very, very often specious.

The Princeton Plasma Physics lab, where I've been attending lectures, many of which are on fusion, for close to 15 years, was founded in the 1950's.

The solar cell, which was advertised as sufficient to meet all the world's energy needs in advertising at the time, was invented in 1954.



I'm personally still waiting for all the bullshitters about solar energy who write here to tell me when, as the 1954 advertisement says, that there'll be enough solar electricity "to light every lamp and turn every wheel that humanity needs."

I support fusion research, because it would be dishonest of me to object to it while having availed myself of being a guest at PPPL for lectures over the years and also because there are wonderful spin offs related to plasma science.

However, it is now 2024, about 63 years after "Project Matterhorn" morphed into PPPL after building the first stellarators under the direction of Lyman Spitzer, and about 70 years after he first proposed and built a crude device.

In 1959, a few years after the first stellarator was built, and 5 years after solar cells were predicted "to light every lamp and turn every wheel that humanity needs," the mean concentration of CO₂ in the planetary atmosphere was 315.98 ppm. In 2023 it was 421.08 ppm. So far this year, through the first 14 weeks, the mean average concentration of CO₂ in the planetary atmosphere is 424.66 ppm.

Fusion energy will not address this problem in any remotely timely manner.

I've been hearing about "breakthroughs" my whole adult life, and I'm an old man nearing the end of my life.

We know very well how to make clean energy. Because of the marketing of fear and ignorance, people hate it.

If someone ever builds a fusion reactor that can recover exergy, the same mindless assholes who whine around here about tritium will continue their whining in the unrelenting effort to ply fear and ignorance. Right now there isn't enough tritium on this whole damn planet to run a 1000 MWe fusion reactor for a year.

The issue of clean energy isn't technical; the issue is involved in the sociology of marketing ignorance.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Hazards of Prophecy

There is Arthur C. Clarke's essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination"

Another aphorism: "When in doubt, predict that the present trend will continue." In the case of fusion, the trend is achievement of ever increasing capability. But distinguished scientists of all ages sometimes fall into the other trap of predicting that something won't happen because for millennia it hasn't happened yet.

Some prognosticators failed. So, what else is new? Oh, repeatable advances in plasma physics as the OP illustrates. Thank you, the ever valuable Judi Lynn.

Deuterium-Tritium fusion is only one of several reactions available. D-D draws from 0.016% of water, but there is a lot of water. Tritium can be bred from lithium nuclear reactions.

Certainly the scale of nuclear fission energy production can be scaled up, but itself faces severe challenges, among which is that scaling up is not as easy as paper exercises seem to show. They tend to require massive capital investments. Where they are done cheaply, they tend to have severely damaging failures. To counter that there are efforts to makes small reactors which are also promised via announcements of breakthroughs with a frequency not unlike announcement of fusion breakthroughs. Massive scale up of nuclear fission energy production would also mean scale up of number and severity of failures. Nuclear waste is the ultimate NIMBY. Even transporting it is a big deal. Last but not finally or least, scaled up nuclear fission power would be run by the same ilk of corporate greed that saddled us with excess atmospheric carbon in the first place.

There are no easy solutions to the dilemma. Societal issues have to be addressed with technological solutions and societal solutions can enable technological deployment. Constant railing against all partial solutions except one favourite is I think a variation on the all-or-nothing group of fallacies.

No partial solution is perfect but there does not have to be one perfect solution. The integrated totality of partial solutions is greater than sum of each individually. If we are serious about the competition of ideas we have to move forward on multiple fronts.

No single solution can be chosen (by who?) to satisfy all societal constraints and balances. Who are we to decide for humanity what the balance of million-year risks versus instant risks versus 30-year risks etc is? Technocrats? Facebook polls? In the absence of a world government (dubious desirability) that functions well (could never happen faster than mature nuclear fusion power), ... in that absence we must try and we must do what we can. Fusion is obviously not a short term solution and we are in desperate need of a short term solution. But neither is massively deployed fission with the current state of that technology and public concerns (which have some legitimacy and must be considered).

[NNadir]

6. I'm sorry, but I read science, not science fiction, because I'm a scientist, not a kid watching SciFi cartoons.

Nuclear fission has a 70 year commercial history and all, every last damned one, 100%, of the very stupid and dangerous objections rely on selective attention. It is the only form of energy that people insist must be perfect, with the result that we're killing the planet with fossil fuels to which there seems to be no "challenges."

The only "severe" challenge to fission energy is the widespread application of mysticism and stupidity in connection with it. It works, and has a spectacular record of saving human lives despite intellectually and morally challenged people who can't count, as in count the 80 to 90 million people who died from air pollution while morons carried on about Fukushima and compare that to the number of radiation deaths from Fukushima.

The number of radiation related deaths, for one example of a public festival of ignorance, Fukushima, is reported in this paper (by a set of scientists whose whole scientific life is connected to studying the effects of radiation at Fukushima:

Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)

It's open sourced, but an excerpt is relevant:

However, in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant(FDNPP) accident, no direct health hazards due to radiation, such as acute radiation injury, were observed, while various indirect health effects were reported even in the acute phase [2, 3]. Major health effects are attributed to the initial emergency evacuation and displacement, deterioration of the shelter environment, evacuation from nursing homes, and psychological and social health effects. In addition, there were also the effects of medical collapse, where lives that could normally be saved by medical care could not be saved due to a lack of medical resources [4, 5]. It is known that these effects are particularly susceptible to the socially vulnerable [6].

.

I added the bold.

Now the rest of the cited text - some of these authors live and work in Fukushima and have always done so; their institution is Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima City, Japan - indicates that the fear of radiation killed people, but radiation itself didn't. By the way, this group has published hundreds of papers on the topic.

I take the "severe challenge" being one of pure easily spread ignorance.

On a planetary scale the fear of radiation - which is the only fucking "severe challenge" to there being common sense and decency with respect to the climate crisis being addressed by existing, operative, readily accessible technology, commercial nuclear fission - is killing 19,000 people every damned day. It's called "air pollution." Note that this number does not include the people killed in Pakistan when 1/3 of the country went under water because of melting glaciers, it doesn't include the dead from the wildfires that, for one example, struck in a firestorm that destroyed Fort McMurray in Alberta, the people killed by smoke from the Canadian fires that blanketed the Northeast last summer.

The fucking planet is on fire now, and we have assholes here whining now about the release of dilute tritium from the Fukushima reactor and then saying, "Oh we don't need tritium, because we have deuterium."

It is immoral, dangerous, and deadly to take this kind of shit for brains nonsense seriously.

The crap about lithium breeding is decades old. It has never been demonstrated in a fusion system. Neither has the D-D fusion bullshit "in case D-T doesn't work." In decades of lectures on the topic there have been zero people who have demonstrated D-D fusion confinement.

Am I being addressed like someone whose knowledge of nuclear energy comes from reading cartoons and bullshit in the NY Times, or do I get any credit for listening to at least 50 lectures on fusion from primary researchers in the field, as well as having a son who can discuss helium embrittlement in tungsten and in fact was just a coauthor on a scientific paper on the topic, a topic that the fusion community is nowhere near to addressing?

But...but...but...Arthur C. Clark says...

And personally, I couldn't give a rat's ass what Arthur C. Clark says or said. The 2001 movie was produced many decades ago; it was cute fiction, but guess what? Space aliens from Jupiter didn't show up either.

Look, all day long I have been working at my job on projects in connection with gene therapy. It's not easy; it's hard. And anybody who wishes to do handwaving to say it was inevitable has never worked on it, doesn't know anything about it and has simply never been near the front lines of it. It has never been inevitable "if we only try."

And then I come home to "Arthur Clarke says if we can imagine it, it will happen." Did he ever imagine eternal life, because he's dead? He died 3 years and 8 days before the Sendai Earthquake which led to a vast outpouring of stupidity that none of his science fiction novels predicted, or in climate time, the time scale I like to use, 40.16 ppm of increases in the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO₂ ago.

While we all do the fusion happy dance, the data as of this morning:

April 14: 425.27 ppm
April 13: 425.70 ppm
April 12: 424.80 ppm
April 11: 425.41 ppm
April 10: 427.35 ppm
Last Updated: April 15, 2024

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Guess what? The people who died on the Titanic were not saved because someday the helicopter would be invented. They drowned. The invention of the helicopter was too damned late for them. Maybe someday someone will solve all of the intractable problems with fusion, but it is irrelevant. It's already too late. People are dying now because so many people are too morally and intellectually challenged (there's that word "challenged" again) to embrace the last best hope we have on a commercial scale, nuclear fission, invented and developed by some of the finest minds of the 20th century. As a result of this morally and intellectually challenged set, the catastrophe is underway and its worsening by the hour on a faster and faster pace.

The lack of seriousness here is appalling, because frankly, it kills people, and is in fact, killing just about every ecosystem on this planet.

Have a nice evening.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. Your cheap shot about me being a kid watching sci-fi cartoons is not worthy of you

Thus you are insincere wishing me "a nice evening".

And somehow you yearn to be taken seriously.

[NNadir]

8. My "shot" is neither cheap nor is it really all that personal.

Last edited Tue Apr 16, 2024, 07:08 PM - Edit history (1)

It's generic in the sense that this statement, "Certainly the scale of nuclear fission energy production can be scaled up, but itself faces severe challenges..." is also generic.

Then there's the rote "problem" of so called "nuclear waste."

We have two kinds of antinukes here at DU:

The first is honest straight up antinukes, who openly say "I'm an antinuke." They're awful people but are honestly awful. They of course kill people much like antivaxxers kill people, although antivaxxers could never aspire to killing 19,000 people per day for decades as straight up antinukes do. Antivaxxers are small potatoes in comparison to antinukes.

The second kind is dishonest "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes who claim to have open minds but then choose to drag out every nonsensical objection nuclear power and to boot, want me to worry if they think I should be taken seriously.

In many ways the second kind is, in my view, worse than the first, because the first are honest about being ignorant, and the second are dishonest about ignorant.

Frankly, I couldn't care less what antinukes of either the first or second kind like me, respect me, or take me seriously.

With regard to the either, it's very clear that they cannot take anything seriously, not climate change, not human health, not even making simple comparisons.

First comparison, a subset of all possible comparisons:

Here's what I ask antinukes of the first and second kind whenever they carry on about so called "nuclear waste." I ask them, effectively, with slight variations in the wording to demonstrate something about the nuclear industry which is now approaching 70 years old. Specifically, I ask them which has killed more people over different periods of time, the storage of used nuclear fuel, *waste" in their dishonest rhetoric) in its entire 70 year history, or fossil fuel waste, also known as "air pollution," in some shorter period of time, usually around6 or 8 or 12 hours, but in this case I'll extend it to two weeks.

The requirement I attach to this question is that it come from a reputable source in the primary scientific literature.

I often an example I frequently post of a reputable source for the death toll from air pollution, the highly respected medical journal Lancet.

It is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

I keep this text handy for whenever someone wants to whine and cry about so called "nuclear waste."

I note that climate change is also a product of fossil fuel waste, not that I expect anyone whining about so called "nuclear waste" to give a rat's ass about climate change or to take it seriously.

As for this clap trap about "more accidents" I have produced in this intellectually dubious exchange, a reference from the primary scientific literature showing that radiation deaths from the big, big, big, big, big bogey man at Fukushima is reported to be ZERO as of 2022. This means it takes only a few gasoline fires or gas explosions to have a much higher death toll than the death toll from radiation from the Sendai/Fukushima earthquake that people have no problem firing up their computers, generally powered by fossil fuel powered electricity.

Here from a website easy to which one can easily Google, is a chart of the death toll from vehicle fires:



Statistica, US Vehicle Fires

I am not going to waste time chasing the source of the data, but it would be fair to ask any "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke to assert which has killed more people in the last half a century, vehicle fires specifically or gasoline started fires in general, or nuclear accidents. Any and all antinukes of the first or second kind should feel free to answer. An account of the death toll from all nuclear accidents, the big bogey man at Fukushima, the bigger bogey man at Chernobyl (which changed me from a dumb shit antinuke into a vociferous believer in nuclear energy) or even more silly, "Three Mile Island," would also be required to refer to reputable scientific literature as opposed to junk from the circle jerk of badly educated antinukes.

We could go on forever about this, for example I could post some numbers because numbers don't lie, even if people lie to themselves and each other. For example I could post the numbers for energy production from the multi-trillion dollar solar and wind industry - which has failed miserably to address climate change - and nuclear energy which has labored under the specious objections of people whining about waste and accidents, but only nuclear accidents, clearly not giving a rat's ass about fossil fuel waste (air pollution and climate change) or fossil fuel accidents. Let me do so:

The numbers are here: 2023 World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), Table A.1a on Page 264.



By the way, I don't take the soothsaying in this chart seriously; I've been downloading annual World Nuclear Outlook for too many years, about 20 years, to do so. On the other hand, the historical numbers can be taken seriously, they represent data, not fortune telling.

As for taking me seriously, I'm not really bothered by antinukes of the first kind or those of the second kind not taking me seriously. From my perspective they can't take climate change seriously, the vast wildfires, the vanishing glaciers, the droughts, the extreme storms, none of it. (Which is more expensive, climate change or nuclear power?) They can't take air pollution deaths seriously. Why should I fret if they don't take me seriously? If I am described as wanting to be taken seriously under these conditions, I assure anyone who asks that I am being misrepresented, not that I care particularly about that either.

An now, for all these "objections" to nuclear energy, I'd like to return to my previous analogy about the Titanic.

First a few more remarks that are easily verified.

The nuclear industry is, again, nearly 70 years old. In less than 25 years, between 1960 and 1985 the United States, the country where I live, built more than 100 commercial reactors and a large number of research reactors, many of both kinds which continue to save lives. They did so while providing the cheapest electricity in the Industrial World. They did in a world without serious computer power, without an internet, without portable phones, without sophisticate modern tools we no take for granted. It is a commercial industry in the United States, and is also used internationally. In this century, China built 53 nuclear reactors which now operate, along with the three built in the 20th century. They have 26 more under construction. They are experts at building nuclear reactors, which we here in the United States might have been had we not destroyed our nuclear construction at the behest of people who cannot take either air pollution mortality or climate change seriously.

To me, with a planet on fire, the food supply threatened by extreme weather, someone whining - with obvious selective attention - about the alleged "risks" of nuclear power strike me as people on the Titanic as it was sinking who refused to get into the lifeboats because they weren't heated, not stocked with food and wine, and there was a risk of dying of exposure in an open boat, the latter being a very real risk because they had no assurance of rescue.

Our planet has no assurance of rescue.

People waiting for the fusion miracle to take place are rather like people waiting for the invention of the helicopter to act on trying to save themselves from sinking with the Titanic into the North Atlantic Ocean.

They are, in a word, absurd.

As to whether my comments are personal or generic, true, there are some specifics for this case, reference to the Science Fiction writer for example, but it's similar to other cases, for example a recent one where an antinuke posted a reference to an antinuke sociologist/conspiracy theorist who claimed that the world's media is "covering up" Fukushima. (In my opinion, the media can't stop talking about Fukushima, which, given the scale of the fossil fuel disaster is clearly trivial.) Trust me, my anger, at this awful nonsense is indeed generic, references to specific points notwithstanding.

To close, I really, really, really, really neither want nor expect to be taken seriously by anyone who clearly can't take far more important things than my personality seriously, specifically, fossil fuel waste, fossil fuel accidents, and climate change.

Have a pleasant evening, whether you believe I wish it or not.