South Korea ignites a spark of nuclear fusion hope

(MENAFN- Asia Times)

DAEJEON – South Korea's artificial sun recently made headlines for passing a key milestone on the roadmap toward useable nuclear fusion – a Holy Grail energy source that could provide mankind with clean, safe and virtually unlimited energy.

In November last year, it was announced that the KSTAR, or Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research facility, had achieved a 30-second fusion plasma operation at ion temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius.

Although that is a key milestone, it remains far distant from the end game. And that end game will not be realized by South Korea alone – indeed, the artificial sun is only one component in a much larger international project: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER.

KSTAR, and related facilities around the world such as China's EAST that all contribute to ITER, hold the tantalizing promise of solving two of mankind's most vexing problems.

“If and when fusion power is deployed at commercial scale, it could be a hugely valuable means of addressing two of the world's most pressing challenges: expanding access to energy safely and at a reasonable cost, while accelerating the move away from planet-heating fossil fuels,” Simon Mundy, author of the recently published“Race for Tomorrow: Survival, Innovation and Profit on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis“ told Asia Times.

In terms of big science, ITER could shape mankind's future in ways that are more profound than the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program. Yet despite the massive funds and the impressive scale of international cooperation being invested, the dream of nuclear fusion energy still hides over a very distant horizon.

KSTAR is a pilot project that feeds information and technologies into ITER. 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 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.

That facility will be the world's largest tokamak – an experimental magnetic fusion device, or artificial sun. Its mission is to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale, carbon-free source of energy, based on the same principle that powers the sun and more distant stars.

It aims to create net energy: 500 megawatts of fusion power output from 50MW of input.

KSTAR, which lies in the South Korean science-focused city of Daejeon, south of Seoul, is a pilot version of the ITER tokamak that is developing advanced operational scenarios for ITER.

“KSTAR is kind of a smaller machine than ITER,” KSTAR Director Yoon Si-woo told visiting reporters earlier this month, noting that the ITER tokamak will be 10 times larger.

“ITER is close to completion, and what ITER is trying to do is what every fusion machine is trying to do, but ITER is very, very large.”

Beyond scale, the machinery and principles remain largely the same.“We are developing the basic operational method of how ITER will operate after construction,” Yoon said.

KSTAR is specializing in a key fusion component, which is maintaining or“containing” ultra-high temperature/high-density plasma. Plasma is a hydrogen state where electrons and ions are separated.

“We are working very closely with ITER, developing scenarios and controls, and have contracts with ITER to do experiments in KSTAR,” Yoon said.

Even after ITER presses the“on” switch, it will not invalidate KSTAR.“KSTAR is smaller and more flexible, so we can present many interesting insights for ITER's operations,” Yoon said.

KSTAR and its parent body, the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy, is fully funded by Seoul, with an annual budget of US$200 million guaranteed through 2035. The financial sustainability thereby provided is winning KSTAR experiments from other ITER states.

“We are getting contracts from other countries as they are running out of resources – these numbers are quite high,” Yoon said, without mentioning the countries concerned.“We have invested a lot in KSTAR, but we are already getting benefits in terms of investment.”

Yoon admits that commercial applications of the technology are not the focus.“This is a complex, integrated research area, so it is difficult to find other applications,” he said.

Even so, interest is rising. KSTAR boasts world-class technologies in some aspects of its tokamak – its winding coils (for coolant), its thermal shield and its vacuum vessels.

And thanks to South Korea's shipbuilding industry, which leads the world in high-tech, high-stress metal bashing,“the accuracy of construction is higher for KSTAR,” Yoon reckons. As a result of all this,“startup companies are coming,” he said, particularly those engaged in small component construction.

KSTAR's mission is to maintain super-heated plasma for 300 seconds – what Yoon calls“the minimum time frame to demonstrate steady-state operations.” If achieved,“this plasma can work forever,” he said.

A phased plan is in place. The next step is to achieve 50 seconds in 2022, and to pass the critical 300-second milestone by 2026.

That will not be easy.“There are many things we have to understand to achieve 300 seconds,” Yoon said.“We have a long way to go.”

Issues include the overall instability of plasma and the need to upgrade hardware in the tokamak, including upgrading key materials to tungsten. Major questions also hang over the handling of tritium, a hydrogen isotope.

But while KSTAR focuses on the“confinement” of high-temperature/high-density plasma, ITER will take the dream to the next step:“burning” plasma.

That demonstration should prove fusion's viability – leading to conversion and actual energy generation. It is that process that could be commercialized in working, fusion power plants.

That is the plan. But don't hold your breath. Though the nuclear fusion concept has been around for more than a century, and the first experiment was conducted in 1950, programs are now accelerating, Yoon said.

If KSTAR continues its upward trajectory and manages a 300-second containment of plasma by 2026, and the much bigger ITER also succeeds in its net energy output, most hurdles will be overcome.

“By 2035, most questions will be answered,” Yoon expects.

Outside observers praised recent milestones.“There is a sense of gathering momentum in the field – reflected by the recent $1.8 billion fundraising by Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems,” said author Mundy.

In December 2021, the fund drive from Commonwealth, a fusion startup, garnered money from, among others, George Soros and the Gates Foundation.

If and when ITER proves the concept of net energy output, Yoon expects the energy industry to jump aboard. He anticipates the commercial energy sector will be using fusion by 2050,“if everything goes according to plan.”

For sector watchers, that is a big“if.”

“Some amount of skepticism about the near-term prospect of commercial fusion power seems justified after the decades that scientists have already spent chasing that goal,” Mundy cautioned.

Even Yoon, the affable KSTAR project director who has dedicated his career to fusion, wonders out loud if the project will reach full fruition, given the unchanging timelines he has seen come and go.

“At university, when I was starting to understand fusion, my professor told us it would take 30 years to develop,” he recalled.“Now I have the same answers – and I realize that for the last 30 years, we've had the same number.”

He adds with a touch of whimsy:“We have to live longer.”

Yet clearly, nuclear fusion is feasible. So is its role as an energy source equally feasible?

“There is the sun, so that is the basic principle, but can we do it in a controlled way? Nobody knows,” Yoon admitted.“There is no guarantee.”

To read Part 1 of this story, please click here.

For more from this writer on Twitter, follow @andrewsalmon

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