admin South Korean artificial sun KSTAR has officially broken the world record by achieving an ion100 million degrees for a time span of 20 seconds. What makes this a commendable feat is the fact that the sun itself burns at 15 million degrees.
This record has been broken for fusion by Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR). This temperature reached by KSTAR is approximately 6.6 times that of the sun and it is called as Korea’s artificial sun. The same temperature was achieved once in the year 2018 but could not last even half the time span, that is, it could retain the ion temperature only for a mere time span of 1.8 seconds.
In 2019, again an attempt was made and considerable success was also achieved but then again it was for 8 seconds. This year’s record is phenomenal as no one has been able to sustain the ion temperature of 100 million degrees for a whopping 20 seconds.
Koreans have been trying very hard to achieve this form of success and over 100 experiments were done between the time period of August and December 10, 2020 before finally achieving this feat. This was primarily made possible by the use of Internal Transport Barrier Mode that was developed recently.
The reaching of this landmark is largely attributed to the use of technologies for administering this temperature and fusion, according to the KSTAR director Si-Woo Yoon.
It is expected that this success will further open innumerable doors for such long experiments related to fusion and possibly nuclear fusions as well.
This KSTAR experiment is not purely Korean, it is being done jointly. The experiment is being done at the the Korean Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) and research is being done by the Seoul National University (SNU) and the United States Columbia University.
Now, with this spectacular achievement, the focus has now shifted to bettering the technology in the future. The main aim is to increase the time that the ion temperature can hold as well as reducing the intake of energy.
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