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upstart writes:

The director of the Korean research centre said the 2020 experiment marked an 'important turning point' in making commercial nuclear fusion reactors:

A fusion device in South Korea made a breakthrough when it maintained a temperature nearly seven times hotter than the sun for 20 seconds.

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor managed to maintain an ion temperature of more than 100m degrees Celsius "without plasma edge instabilities or impurity accumulation". The heat of centre of the sun is estimated to be around 15m degrees Celsius.

The record was hit in 2020, but the associated research paper was published this month in the journal Nature after being peer-reviewed.

The researchers noted that other fusion devices have briefly managed plasma at temperatures of 100m degrees Celsius or higher. However, none of them managed to maintain this for 10 seconds or longer.

[...] "KSTAR's success in maintaining the high-temperature plasma for 20 seconds will be an important turning point in the race for securing the technologies for the long high-performance plasma operation, a critical component of a commercial nuclear fusion reactor in the future."

The final goal of the KSTAR is to succeed in a continuous operation of 300 seconds with an ion temperature higher than 100m degrees Celsius by 2025.

I'm noticing the use more and more in these kind of articles of odd or incorrect units, here using "m" for million. What's up with that? [hubie]

Journal Reference:
Han, H., Park, S.J., Sung, C. et al. A sustained high-temperature fusion plasma regime facilitated by fast ions. Nature 609, 269–275 (2022). 10.1038/s41586-022-05008-1

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