The South Korean artificial sun, which goes by the name KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research), has made an important scientific discovery concerning nuclear fusion by being able to sustain plasma in high-confinement mode for a period of 102 seconds while simultaneously managing to keep plasma temperature at 100 million degrees centigrade for 48 seconds. This development by the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) is another move towards achieving clean fusion energy, whose ability to generate unlimited amounts of electricity with little to no carbon emission is promising.
Currently we still don’t know whether it’s possible to generate more power than you need to maintain the fusion.
ITER is the European project that should test that. It still is an experimental reactor and won’t generate power.
Several other reactors are currently being built, but only recently they started building ones that in theory could run for a longer time than a few minutes.
But nobody knows if it will be useful.
Well they have two commercial plants coming online and expecting to produce power sometime in 2030. So they better figure it out!
There’s one company that claims they’ve done it at lab scale and are building it out at a power plant scale now.