The K-STAR nuclear fusion reactor, in Daejeon, South Korea, will be succeeded by a larger, more ambitious project.
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From Nature magazine
South Korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey.
The project is provisionally named K-DEMO (Korean Demonstration Fusion Power Plant), and its goal is to develop the design for a facility that could be completed in the 2030s in Daejeon, under the leadership of the country’s National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI).
South Korea is already developing the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (K-STAR) project and contributing to ITER, the €15-billion (US$20-billion) experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, France, under the auspices of an international collaboration. K-DEMO is intended to be the next step toward commercial reactors and would be the first plant to actually contribute power to an electric grid.
“It is a very smart strategy to take advantage of the experience gained in constructing ITER and to immediately proceed to construct a fusion power plant like K-DEMO,” says Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, an advocacy group in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
K-DEMO will serve as prototype for the development of commercial fusion reactors. According to the PPPL, it will generate “some 1 billion watts of power for several weeks on end”, a much greater output than ITER's goal of producing 500 million watts for 500 seconds by the late 2020s.
Building up know-how
In early 2012, the South Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced that developing technologies to build K-DEMO would be a priority for the next 10 years, establishing the know-how to permit the construction of a commercial fusion power plant between 2022 and 2036. The government also announced that it planned to invest about 1 trillion won (US$941 million) in the project. About 300 billion won of that spending has already been funded, according to a source within the ministry. The government expects the project to employ nearly 2,400 people in the first phase, which will last throughout 2016.
Robert Goldston, who was the director of the PPPL when it helped with the initial design of K-STAR, believes that the K-DEMO project is feasible, considering South Korea's commitment to its previous project. "There was a financial crisis in Asia right in the middle of the K-STAR project, but the government and fusion scientists were steady and serious about getting the job done, despite lots of hardship," he says. "My sense is that the Korean team, at all levels, is very dedicated to a steady pace even in adversity — and there is always adversity in big projects."
Lee Gyung-Su, a research fellow at NFRI and a former chairman of the ITER Management Advisory Committee, says that Korea is desperately in need of the energy that fusion could provide. “Korea has a lack of energy resources,” he says. “The population density is high and the country consumes so much energy," Lee adds, "we have a different perspective on fusion energy compared to the United States.”
ITER has experienced repeated delays and cost increases, prompting some critics to question whether the project will ever be completed. "It is already obvious that future commercial-size machines will be too large and costly, and too expensive to operate, to generate competitive energy," says Thomas Cochran, a consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington DC. He adds that he believes South Korea should spend its resources on technologies that have the potential to provide a nearer-term impact on carbon emissions and climate change.
Lee acknowledges the criticism, but says that most of ITER's issues were of a management, rather than a technical nature. “The schedules are now mostly fixed and sorted out,” he says. “And risks always exist when it comes to a new finding in science, and the investment on the research and development has been made based on the estimation of such risks.”
Moreover, Lee adds, “we are willing to take risks, and need to innovate to survive".
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on January 21, 2013.
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31 Comments
Add CommentCongrats to South Korea for having the long term vision to see this through. This isn't an easy project and the risks are high, but success could be a breakthrough that would affect the whole world.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is also good to see a country looking into the future and acknowledging their upcoming energy challenges. Access to economical energy sources is not going to be less of a problem in the future, it will be more challenging. This project has a chance of fixing that.
Hopefully the US sees this and takes some lessons from it.
Nuclear fusion is still theoretically the perfect energy source. Virtually limitless supply of deuterium and tritium in ocean water, no radioactive waste, no greenhouse gas emissions, no weapons grade radioactive material are what has made fusion so sexy for the last 30 years. Now if we can just overcome some of the daunting technical problems with containment fields it would change the world.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGuess the worlds 'power barons' are casting evil eyes at this project because it could be a game-changer, and all their 'energy marketing' will be exposed as propaganda. Everyone who saw what Enron did to the state of California knows better than to trust....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce again....we (america) are taking a back seat to the future of power generation....in this case, putting korea in the drivers seat....is there anything we can just do ourselves....this is rediculous....we give money to islamic countries, fight unwinable wars, support rouge factions, fund the overthrowing of other governments....and allow our own unmotivated citizens to live on our motivated taxpayer's money....as a country, we are insane, and the head mental case is our president...fusion reactors could save our planet in more than the global warming way....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI thought it was still not known how anyone's going to get the energy from fusion reactors turning generators. Not even preliminary ideas, or back-of-envelope stuff.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's also the enormous containment problem : finding materials which can withstand the neutron bombardment.
Some argue that there's also a tritium problem.
It seems quite a gamble really.
@phalaris There are a wide variety of ways to convert the output of Fusion to electricity. I think the reason you don't hear talk about them is that they are a very small problem compared to the containment issue. One step at a time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEconomic madness is expecting that our current use of fossil fuels is going to work forever. Casting aside any questions of environmental impact all fossil fuels are a limited resource. Even now they are requiring more advanced technologies to extract. The easy stuff is gone. At some point they will get very expensive and run out. The future generations of power will require bigger projects like these to make work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for the economic impact, just looking at 2000 jobs for the first phase doesn't even come close to the positive effect this project has. That billion dollars gets spent on high tech materials and help from outside companies that make the project happen. Just the technology spin offs from projects like these are enormous. New ways of working with materials are created. These new technologies get applied to everything from better kitchen knives to lighter airplanes. New approaches to physics are developed that lead to breakthroughs in a wide variety of fields. Much of our current products that we use every day were influenced by projects such as these. The ROI for a country investing this level of project can often be significant, even if the project fails to meet its goals. Regrettably most people don't understand the big picture economics related to scientific funding and this ends up limiting the projects that get money.
Although I support continued fusion research I think that we're better served to learn to make use of the existing fusion reactor in our corner of the universe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@bobhiggins - I couldn't agree with you more. A blended strategy will have the best chance of success. We should be working on both Solar and Fusion projects. Solar is far more mature right now and close to being economically competitive. Fusion is better for many reasons, but is also more expensive and a riskier project. A good mix of currently feasible renewables (Wind, solar, wave/hydro and third gen nuke) mixed with a good commitment to research makes sense to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe need to get off this dirty downward slope of fossil fuels as soon as we can. Environmentally, economically and politically it makes sense.
I've talked to physicists who tell me that fusion is the energy source of the future...and always will be.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have the ability to make use of limitless quantities of fusion energy right now if we take advantage of all the sources you mention, (after all they're all children of the sun's power) without reinventing the sun and installing miniature versions of it in our suburbs.
Also there's the time factor involved here. We don't have another twenty years to begin a retreat from fossil fuels that should have begun thirty years ago. In twenty years we may need fusion reactors that float.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSomeone have news about Polywell development?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPolywell seems very interesting, because the possibility of make aneutronic fusion of hydrogen and boron, resulting in costs very below of Tokamak's and many other advantages.
Since US Navy begun to fund Polywell development (last August), the news apparently stopped. Is it becoming a classified issue?
Robert Bussard, who along with Robert Hirsch founded the Tokamak program in the USA, became disillusioned with it, and instead supported smaller, faster programs:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"..One of the biggest obstacle is the world-wide tokamak lobby, which perpetuates the fraud that Hirsch, Trivelpiece and I foisted on the country in the 1970's when we started the big tokamak ball rolling.
Magnetic conFinement fusion is a misnomer, as magnetic fields can NOT confine a plasma, only constrain its motion towards walls. The entire history of the MagConf program has been to reduce transport to neo-classical (not turbulent or instability-driven) losses. And THEN the machines are all inherently and inevitably huge and cost too much and make too much power to ever be economically useful --- as the utilities have been telling the AEC/DoE for 30 years. No matter, the global tokamak program provides jobs for hudreds of thousands of people in many countries, and is a safe place to put political pork funding, simply because it IS NO THREAT TO OIL - it won't ever work, but it sounds good to the untutored public.."
He also explained, in a most unwelcome letter to Congress how Fast-Trak fusion could be achieved:
www.askmar.com/Robert%20Bussard/1995-6-6%20Letter%20to%20Congress.pdf
Of course, as a response to the letter, the Navy imposed a gag order on his research, being funded by them.
Robert Bussard tells the story on IEC Fusion, an excellent prospect, but gets a meager $2M/yr funding - from the US Navy which refuses to release results on the program in spite of the incredible value to humanity & the environment. Instead they throw $billions away on nutty $50/gal biofuels. And Fast-Trak fusion funding is currently at a level Big Oil or their subsidiary Big Green (Wind & Solar) call pocket change or coffee money.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisforums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=58665#27
".. We told the DoD from the beginning that the real program would cost about 150-200M..since the DoD has no charter to do such work, the political realities were that a big DoD program would attract the ire and power of the DoE to kill it, it was never funded beyond about 1/8 the level required.
So we did what we could and finally DID prove the physics and associated engineering physics constraints, scaling laws.. at 1/8-1/10 scale..same 200 M we have quoted to the DoD since the beginning.."
"..As for energy companies "stampeding" to support us - It is clear that a view like this is ignorant of the reality of energy companies. There is only one thing the oil companies want, and that is to sell oil, and more oil. So long as the fields pump, the oil companies will squeeze. They have NO, absolutely NO interest in anything new, ins spite of all their foolish ads in magazines for wind mills and solar-PV roofs. It is all just show and tell. I know these guys, and there is no way they would support anything that might get in the way of oil. The only way to stop oil, from their view, is when it does run out. And then they'll go for deeper drilling, new fields, Gulf geopressure gas, LNG, etc, etc, and keep raising the price, until finally foolish solar and windmills become competitive.."
Fusion reactors have been built for a long time. High school students have build Farnsworth fusors.
iecfusiontech.blogspot.ca/2008/06/students-achieve-fusion.html
The Joint European Torus, from Wikipedia:
"..in 1997, another world record was achieved at JET: 16 mega watts of fusion power were produced from a total input power of 24 mega watts – a 65 % ratio.."
The JT-60 in Japan:
"..In fusion terminology JT-60 achieved conditions which in D–T would have provided Q = 1.25, where Q is the ratio of fusion power to input power.."
nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/new-pictures-and-updated-goals-for-emc2.html
The Navy, which is funding IEC fusion has slapped a Gag Order on all publication of results, and only wants to legally block others from developing the tech.
Other Fast-Trak Fusion Methods that get Zip in gov't funding whereas nutty Wind & Solar scams get 100's of $billions in funding, with ZERO hope of amounting to anything more than a minor adjunct to fossil fuels, not even remotely close to being able to replace them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFocus Fusion:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVif4hUAJ8c
nextbigfuture.com/2011/08/lawrenceville-plasma-physics-focus.html
nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/lawrenceville-plasma-physics-makes.html
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760&q=Google+tech+talks+lerner&pr=goog-sl
Super Marx Deuterium & Laser Fusion-Fission Hybrid:
nextbigfuture.com/2009/10/winterberg-compares-super-marx.html
Reversed Field Pinch Fusion:
www.sciencecodex.com/upping_the_power_triggers_an_ordered_helical_plasma
Guided Impact Fusion:
nextbigfuture.com/2012/12/guided-impact-fusion.html
DARPA's Handheld Nuclear Fusion Reactor:
www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/darpas-handheld-nuclear-fusion-reactor/
Muon Catalyzed Fusion:
newenergyandfuel/com/2009/10/05/the-new-cold-fusion/
Tri-Alpha Energy's Aneutronic Colliding Beam Fusion:
nextbigfuture.com/2010/06/tri-alpha-energy-nuclear-fusion-patent.html
Similar to Tri-Alpha, Helion Energy:
www.helionenergy.com/
The Crossfire Magnetic & Electrostatic Aneutronic Fusion Reactor:
www.crossfirefusor.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor/overview.html
Magneto-Inertial-Fusion (MIF):
nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/magneto-inertial-fusion.html
General Fusion's Magnetized Target fusion:
nextbigfuture.com/2012/05/general-fusion-targets-prototype-by.html
LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions), a lot of SCAMs about that, but it appears there is some truth to the effect, Brillouin Energy claims:
pesn.com/2012/04/19/9602078_Brillouin--Understanding_How_LENR_Works_Will_Enable_Us_to_Be_First/Brillouin_PPT_Technical_3-27-12.pdf
Mitsubishi on LENR:
indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379
A load of Fusion related info:
nextbigfuture.com/search/label/fusion
I'm afraid that the REAL TRUTH as to why practical fusion is not being developed, and the mass media including SCIAM here, either ignores it or denounces it, while endlessly hyping impractical Pixie Power Renewable Energy SCAMS, is because Big Oil wants it that way. And what Big Oil wants, Big Oil gets.
Please spare us the conspiracy mongering. Until you have HARD proof of "Big Oil" interfering with fusion energy research, leave this unfounded claptrap on some other site that doesn't have SCIENTIFIC in its title.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf "Big Oil" is trying to promote renewable energy, how come all of the bogus attacks against solar, wind, etc. come from fossil fuel mouthpieces like the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Institute for Energy Research and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?
From a founder of the US Tokamak Fusion Program to Congress:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline labs would not try.
Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic Senators and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their districts. But fear of undermining their budget position also made DoE bureaucrats very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new approach, whether inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to fight industry wherever a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared.
See http://www.oocities.org/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html
@Decarian
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell first of all South Korea isn't a commie state and secondly it's one trillion WON which is Korea's currency and roughly equivalent to 950 million IF you read the story.
Congrats to S.Korea for stepping up to the plate.
Interesting Sault talking conspiracy but immediately starts on his oft-repeated Heritage foundation/fossil fuel conspiracy theory. Yep, you just compare the trivial ~$2M in donations his Koch Bros to Heritage Foundation vs the 10's of $billions of Big Oil family foundations going to ENGO's: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, UCS, WWF, NRDC and the direct funding of Sault's Ontario Clean Air Alliance by NG companies. For Greenpeace the Heritage Foundation funding is "coffee money". And the $25M secretly funded to the Sierra Club to fund their vicious anti-Nuclear & anti-Coal campaigns from the #1 NG fracking company Chesapeake Energy. With $30M more in the pipeline.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnybody interested in a long list of Wind & Solar, advertisements, promotions, $billion investments and political patronage of the Biggest Oil companies - Chevron, BP, Shell Oil? None on Nuclear. Sure seems Big Oil is not even THE SLIGHTEST BIT worried about Wind & Solar capturing their market share.
I've got a practical concern with building a working fusion plant which produces a billion watts for any period (assuming the implication is that the discussed prototype would produce that much "net" power). Would it be practical or feasible to transport that much electrical power from a single plant to a network? I can imagine initial distribution through massive supercooled superconducter cables, massive supercooled transformers, and a whole series of stepdowns. The massive energy input that may be needed to allow the initial stages of power distribution (as in supercooling) could dramtically reduce the efficiency if such large scale fusion generation can be made reliable and consistent.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre there prototypes in existence or planned that are much smaller and produce more manageable net outputs (at least in theory)?
Multi-Giga-Watt power plants are quite common nowadays. The newest German Coal power plants are 2.2GW. The Areva EPR latest GenIII Nuclear Reactor is 1.7GWe & 4.5GWth. That is not a problem. Main problem with big plants is the very high capital cost that must be raised all at once, and the long delay for a return on that investment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere will probably be some good that comes of it, but the goal of simply creating more jobs is never good. It's "make-work welfare", supporting corporate welfare, increasing consumption, increasing pollution. More wealth, theredfore more confidence, results in more people, more consumption.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe should learn to think in terms of a community of all species. Ideally, the only necessary global conflict is that all individuals and families of all species should be free to migrate, and all communities should be free to decide whether to accept them. That's pretty much as it is, but with some contradictions.
Fusion isn't the key to energy independence when it's not even really at break even since no one has created a power plant that breaks even--just a few research reactors that have done that. So it's hundreds of years away yet if then.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe future of energy independence is right under our feet--everywhere be it land or sea.
How so?
By borrowing from the oil & gas industry you can drill a vertical well anywhere to the point the Earth is 400 degrees or more--then drill horizontal wells out 1 to 2 miles from that point in 36 different directions like the spokes on a wheel.
Then fracture the ends of each horizontal well. Inject water into the first one and extract useful energy. And when the Earth in that location cools off so that net energy can't be extracted commercially--move the operations to the next spoke on the hub (wheel, whatever) and begin water injections and energy extraction there.
Then in about 3 or 4 years you get back to the original well and it's heated back up to 400 degrees.
A continuous energy machine that never stops and cost almost nothing once the wells are drilled and the power plant operating.
That's the wave of the future.
You don't have the remotest idea as to how close fusion energy is. Actually fusion is the MOST economical source of energy right now if you went PACER fusion - it just isn't politically tenable. There are dozens of possibilities for fast-trak fusion, as I linked previously, that are quite capable of beating out any energy source we have today. They just need research$. Not much, funding that the Wind & Solar Industries call "chicken feed" or "lunch money".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGeothermal is rarely or barely economical even in areas that have Magma chambers close to surface like Hawaii or Alaska. Iceland, with substantial year round heating needs, uses geothermal effectively for low grade heat applications but still uses cheaper conventional hydro for 80% of its electricity needs. And they are sitting on top of the Mid-Atlantic volcanic rift.
Total Geothermal heat flow even if you tapped the entire Earth's surface wouldn't be enough to power our civilization. Solar heat flow is ~4,000X geothermal per unit area.
Those drill holes you are talking about are enormously expensive, 10's of $million each, rock is a good insulator, so you quickly deplete the heat, and power generation efficiency is very low for the low & declining temperatures.
Alaska sitting on top of Volcanoes, hot springs & active fault zones uses 9.4% Coal, 14.8% Oil, 56.7% NG, 18.9% Hydro and a WHOPPING 0.2% for ALL OF Geothermal, Wind, Solar, Biomass etc.
You would think Hawaii, sitting on top of active volcanoes, would be the Geothermal Power capital of the USA. Instead it relies on Coal for 13%, and expensive imported Oil for 68% of its electricity supply, with 1.8 % coming from Geothermal, 0.7% from Wind Energy and not surprisingly has the highest power rates in the USA of 21.3 cents per kwh. And Hawaii is run by super-Greenies who claim to LOVE Renewable Energy. I would say if Geothermal was so economical they would have figured it out in Hawaii decades ago.
It is very good to see that Korea administration have the vision of the future that others countries are afraid of.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCongratulations!!
You are making the future of world energy, and this is a wonderfull way to escape from the energy barons that are impeding the evolution of humanity!
Dr Francisco Di Biase, Grand PhD
Albert Schweitzer International University, Switzerland
Geraldo Di Biase University, Volta Redonda, Brazil
A fusion reactor would be expensive to maintain.A liftr-thorium reactor would be much simpler to develope and maintain.A good heat exchanger is the only major issue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDrilling through granite is very expensive
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFusion power is our ONLY real option for the future, Global Warming no matter how it happening is real, it has been happening since the last Ice Age ended and will continue until the next one begins. Our fuel supplies are not endless they are finite. Carbon based fuels are running out and sometime within either this century or very early next century they WILL run out, so we have to have another source of energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem is what do we replace them with? Solar? Wind? Nuclear? or Fusion? The problem is, as outlined in 2010 by M. Sanjayan, Phd. Lead Scientist of The Nature Conservancy in his show Powering the Future on the Discovery channel Prof. Soul Griffith calculated that to replace carbon based fuels by 70% by 2050 1600sq ft of solar panel per second needs to be built for the next for 40 years, one wind turbine every three minutes has to be erected, and one nuclear power plant per week.
So the figures speak for themselves it is an impossible task to replace oil UNLESS we find another energy source, and that source has already been researched and in many cases built, it just requires more funding, funding that is wretchedly been underhandedly taken away from said research.
Congratulations to South Korea for having the foresight and guts to put this into action.
The size of these fusion reactors worries me; their cost may make fission reactors look cheap. I wonder if any projections have been made about their practicality in the long term. Also it seems to me that developing a practical means of energy storage, to be used with intermittent power sources (solar and wind), is a better use of the billions that a fusion system will cost.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience fiction has again blurred reality. 50 years from now fusion power will go into the bin with worm holes and dark energy. Unfortunately, the industrial joy ride of the past 150 years is almost over. No matter what we do, the next "Dark Age" is upon us. Maybe someday, mankind will emerge with a vastly reduced population. Let's enjoy our lives now, we are the fortunate ones.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBull, fusion RIGHT NOW, is the cheapest and most plentiful source of energy we can use, if we chose to adopt already proven PACER fusion. It just is politically untenable at the moment. Starvation tends to make the politically untenable suddenly attractive. There is vast amounts of thorium & uranium to supply our energy needs as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou don't have the remotest idea about fusion, high school students build successful fusion reactors, it is just a case of the tech to increase reaction rate, which the Bussard IEC does. Read the comments, do the research before you make stupid comments about something you have zero knowledge.