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Nearly clean, virtually inexhaustible energy has been the promise of nuclear fusion for nearly 70 years. Thanks to the participation of the European Union, China, the United States, India, Japan and South Korea, a nuclear fusion reactor will be created in Cadarache in the south of France by 2025. For this, experiments are taking place in the four corners of the globe, particularly in South Korea. Visit one of these centers in search of the energy of the future.
From our correspondent in Seoul,
« Welcome to the KSTAR experience building, here we are in the meeting room, and KSTAR is the heart of this building “, announces Yoon si-woo. He and his teams did more than reproduce the sun, because for 30 seconds they managed to maintain a plasma at more than 100 million degrees Celsius, six times the temperature of the sun at its heart.
« The sun is spherical and has a configuration that is quite simple, but on Earth we cannot reproduce the sun so we use the magnetic field… To do this, the project director uses KSTAR, a large machine filled with metal tubes that seems to come out of a science fiction film whose objective is to explore the possibilities of nuclear fusion.
You know, it’s very difficult to stop fission, because there’s constant combustion whether you like it or not. But for this plasma fusion system it’s very easy, just stop injecting gas or heating the plasma. It is very difficult to maintain the plasma at very high temperature. When it comes to safety, nothing beats fusion, because the operation itself makes the process safe.
Nuclear fusion, an ideal solution, but still far away
Unlike nuclear fission used today in power plants where atomic nuclei are split, the concept here is to merge them so that they grow and produce considerable energy. ” We have a long way to go, but in many ways nuclear fusion is idealYoon si-woo says. Then he adds:Sure, fuel is abundant in seawater, there is a very broad energy density, and the waste problem is kept to a minimum, when you take all of that into consideration it could be a good proportion of the energy mix in the near future. »
An ideal solution in appearance, but which remains in reality very distant. “In college when I was beginning to understand what fusion was, my professor told me it would take 30 years to develop, and I have to admit that now I will give the same answer“, he concedes.
If KSTAR is only intended for scientific research and not for the production of energy, this is not the case for the ITER reactor (forInternational thermonuclear experimental reactor, or International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, in French) built in the south of France which should be able to produce energy for the first time in 2050.
► To read also: France: ITER, the nuclear project supposed to imitate the Sun, is launched
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