Barely a year after the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) broke one record for fusion, it’s smashed it again, this time holding onto a churning whirlpool of 100 million degree plasma for a whole 30 seconds.
Though it’s well short of the 101 seconds set by the Chinese Academy of Sciences earlier this year, it remains a significant milestone on the road to cleaner, near-limitless energy that could transform how we power our society.
Here’s why it’s so important.
We’re a step closer to limitless energy. The Korea Institute of Fusion Energy has set a new record by running at one million degrees and maintaining super-hot plasma for 30 seconds, beating its own previous record by 10 seconds, a report by New Atlas reveals.
The tokamak reactor used for the record run is the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), which is also known as South Korea’s artificial sun.
Scientists are exploring nuclear fusion technology through various experimental devices, and a popular design for this pursuit of clean, practically inexhaustible energy is known as the tokamak. An exciting example of these donut-shaped reactors can be found at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy, where scientists have reportedly set a new record by maintaining super-hot plasma for 30 seconds.
The idea behind fusion power is to recreate the processes that take place inside the Sun. Huge gravitational forces combine with intense heat and pressure to produce a plasma, in which nuclei smash into each other at high velocity to form helium and release energy.
Tokamaks are designed to recreate this process here on Earth with a series of coils placed around a torus-shaped reactor, magnetically confining plasma heated to millions of degrees for long enough for the fusion of nuclei to occur. Many of these experimental devices are in operation around the world, and the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reactor is one making some promising strides.
And it could halve the transit time to Mars.
Pulsar Fusion Ltd., a nuclear fusion company based in the United Kingdom, has recently designed and successfully tested its first launch-capable, high-power chemical rocket engine.
From launching people and payloads into space, this engine could have numerous applications, but the company’s ultimate goal is to develop a hyper-speed propulsion engine using nuclear fusion technologies for interplanetary travel, with the first prototype expected in 2025.
And when this dream comes into fruition, it could cut the journey time to Mars in half.
The goal: Nuclear fusion-powered engines The company is one of just a few in the world aiming to develop hyper-speed propulsion engines based on nuclear fusion technology. The static test which saw the engine fired into full thrust to measure performance took place on November 17 and 18, 2021 at the Ministry of Defence military base in Salisbury, as seen in the video below, which was released on Sunday.
Full Story:
The Moon awaits. After long decades in which no human being set foot on the lunar surface, we are heading back. And quite soon.
As part of the NASA-led Artemis program, astronauts are returning to the lunar environment as soon as 2024, with a view to ultimately establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon – a place we haven’t seen in person since 1972.
To live and work on the Moon, though, astronauts will need power and plenty of it, and there’s no power grid on the Moon.
Humans haven’t set foot on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. By the time they return to our cosmic neighbor by around 2025, the exploration landscape will be very different due to wide-ranging technological advances.
In a bid to further accelerate the technology that will power future lunar missions, NASA, alongside the Department of Energy (DOE) 0, has put out a press statement calling for companies to help it develop nuclear energy solutions.
Scientists have been experimenting with the creation of nuclear energy for decades and have used nuclear fission — the process of breaking atoms apart — to power everything from devasting atomic bombs to clean nuclear energy.
However, this kind of nuclear energy is different from cosmic inspired nuclear fusion in one significant way: it’s not self-sustaining. Creating enough energy on Earth to power this kind of reaction has been just out of reach for decades.
But that could soon be changing. First reported in August 2021, nuclear scientists from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have come closer than ever before to prove that self-sustaining nuclear fusion — or fusion ignition — is really possible.
If anyone has a good idea on how to put a nuclear fission power plant on the moon, the U.S. government wants to hear about it.
NASA and the nation’s top federal nuclear research lab on Friday put out a request for proposals for a fission surface power system.
NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory to establish a sun-independent power source for missions to the moon by the end of the decade.
We’ve been seeing a wave of innovations in solar panel technology, like perovskite solar cells, solar tiles and roofs, and organic panels. But what if we could harvest solar energy from the windows and skylights of our homes and skyscrapers, or even from our car windows and cellphone screens? Let’s explore transparent solar panels and how they stack up against conventional panels. Could transparent solar cells be the future of solar energy? Or does it remain to be unseen?
Watch Exploring Why This Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Matters: h https://youtu.be/-KEwkWjADEA?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7UWp64ZlOKUPNXePMTdU4d.
Video script and citations:
https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/exploring-why-transparent-s…isnt-clear.
Follow-up podcast:
Video version — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4-aWB84Bupf5hxGqrwYqLA
Audio version — http://bit.ly/stilltbdfm.
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