NUNZIUM

In a world where energy crisis and scarcity of natural fossil fuels is more and more problematic, nuclear physics may be once again what separates present and future times. Nuclear fusion promises near-limitless clean energy by mimicking the natural reactions occurring in the Sun. In the past few years several advancements moved fusion towards commercialisation, which may now be only decades away. So far, state-of-the-art magnetic fusion devices could not yet achieve a sustainable fusion performance, which requires a high temperature above 100 million kelvin and sufficient control of instabilities to ensure steady-state operation on the order of tens of seconds. A study published don September 2 in Nature by a team from Seoul National University and the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy - experimented with the reactor at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) - reported generation of plasmas at a temperature of 100 million kelvin lasting up to 20 seconds without edge instabilities or impurity accumulation. For the first time, a fusion regime rarely subject to disruption and sustained without a sophisticated control is shown. It thus represents a promising path towards commercial fusion reactors. KSTAR is a pilot project that feeds information and technologies into the ITER project. In addition to South Korea, ITER’s 35 member states include China, India, Japan, the EU (including the UK), Russia and the United States. ITER was propelled into force when US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in Geneva in 1985, granting the project with the mandate of benefitting mankind. Multiple countries subsequently joined. In 2005, the international body agreed – after strong bids from Paris and Tokyo – to build ITER in southern France. Construction is underway in Saint Paul-lez-Durance and the ITER facility is expected to come online in December 2025. Experts say that by 2035 most feasibility questions will be answered and by 2050 the commercial sector is likely to use fusion plants.