There has been a significant progress in nuclear fusion following an upgrade of Korea’s “Artificial Sun”.

This upgrade will enable it to hold out against temperatures six times above the centre of the sun.

According to NASA, the sun temperature varies from around 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius) at the centre to just about 10,000 degrees F (5,500 degrees C) at the surface.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) defines nuclear fusion as the process of integrating two light atomic nuclei  to “form a single heavier one while releasing massive amounts of energy”.

Unlike nuclear fission, which is the splitting of an atom into two or more nuclei, fusion does not  generate radioactive waste.

Even though it produces three to four times more energy than fission, fusion releases zero  carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

According to Newsweek, Korea’s “Artificial Sun”, known as KSTAR, “is one of the many fusion devices that relies on magnetic confinement using a donut-shaped device called a tokamak. The contraption uses a series of powerful magnets to contain a circular flow of super-hot plasma—a fourth state of matter that is created when atoms are heated to such high temperatures that they are torn apart, resulting in a soup of negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions.”

KSTAR was initially fitted with a carbon divertor, but it is now fitted with a tungsten divertor.

Having been able to operate  for up to 30 seconds at temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius, with this upgrade, the target is to make KSTAR able to operate for up to  300 seconds by the end of 2026.

The upgrade of KSTAR is expected to  contribute to the development of ITER, the global largest fusion project involving 35 countries.

“While this goal is impressive, it is not the first time such an extended reaction target has been reached. In 2023, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) was able to generate, sustain and confine plasma for 403 seconds in high confinement mode—a state that supports high temperature and particle densities and lays the foundation for more efficient power generation.

“Even so, the South Korean team hopes that their upgrade will enable KSTAR to contribute more accurate data to the development and optimization of ITER, the world’s largest tokamak machine, which is currently under construction in France. ITER is expected to produce its first plasma at the end of 2025, with full-scale operations beginning in 2035,” reported Newsweek.