South Korea takes massive step toward sustainable nuclear fusion reactions

Scientists in Korea have succeeded in sustaining a plasma gas at 100 million kelvin for up to 20 seconds without significant instabilities, a feat thought to be a significant step forward in the quest for a sustainable nuclear fusion reaction. Nuclear fusion – in which huge amounts of energy are released from the fusing of …

[Trotts36]

Fusion on earth is a lie

Believe me I wish it would be possible - but I don’t think we’ll ever get to this utopia before all hell breaks loose and we’re in a mad max style apocalypse.

[gandalfcn]

Re: Fusion on earth is a lie

There's a lot of research now, since the choke hold of the Exxon/Peabody/Koch axis has been broken

[Ian Johnston]

Great. Only ten years to go.

[Nonymous Crowd Nerd]

Again!

Although 2040 sounds like a little further off to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

999 to go

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Lao-Tze

To these and all the boffins who are making the journey, geonbae!

Are we there yet?

[Tom 38]

Re: 999 to go

“Is it not written, ‘I have only one pair of hands’ ?” - Lu-Tze

[Boris the Cockroach]

50 years

ago it was micro seconds the plasma lasted for and it took a fission bomb to generate

So we are making progress.

[Sgt_Oddball]

Yeah, cool story buuuuuut.....

Look at the fuel.. Not the easy to find deuterium but the trickier tritium stuff. There's one place making it on mass (if half a ton a year can be considered mass) and it has a half life around 12 years.

There's a big looming problem that everyone's ignoring and will kibosh all attempts if there's nothing to run the things on.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: Yeah, cool story buuuuuut.....

Lithium 7 .... hit it with neutrons from a fusion reaction and it turns into helium and tritium.

Read up on castle bravo..........

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yeah, cool story buuuuuut..... Tread Lightly

As the shrimp illustrated, there are major risks from tickling the toes of the dragon too hard.

Best have a plan to ramp up tritium production slowly. And while the near horizon "Tritium Crisis" is a logistical concern, I think the reason that people aren't freaking out is that the projects are all still far enough behind schedule that the worst of the crisis may be over by the time that they are projecting the will realistically be coming online. Probably not an insoluble problem if the Japanese stick to their new plans.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Yeah, cool story buuuuuut.....

"making it on mass"

I think you meant to say "making it en masse", although it does sound almost the same.

[ecofeco]

Very impressive!

See title.

[anothercynic]

Re: Very impressive!

Ditto! :-)

Nicely done!

[Lordrobot]

Dame Sue Ion, daughter of MR Bringdown

"We always have coal... if it was good enough for Bob Cratchit it will be good enough for you for the next 250 years...you fancy bloody eggheads... Fusion is a humbug!"

Official Statement from the British Future Technology Department.

[Winkypop]

Then, Mr Fusion…

5 years after

[James Rome]

Nice, but not unprecidented

Tore Supra did that for 6 min in about 2006.

[yogidude]

Fourth state

'plasma gas'. Plasma is formally a different state to the other three. Solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Plasma is modelled using MHD (MagnetoHydroDynamics). Whereas a gas that is not ionised, is just modelled with fluid dynamics (navier-stokes). Good on those Korean Engineers and Physicists though.

[Francis Boyle]

But suspect at

100 million kelvin. I'm pretty sure you can run a fusor for more than six minutes. It's the combination of temperature and duration that's impressive.