South Korea Puts $940 Million Behind Prototype for Fusion Energy

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Written by Richard Finlayson, Senior International Editor for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--South Korea has begun the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey.

The provisional title for the project is Korean Demonstration Fusion Power Plant (K-DEMO), and it aims to develop the design for a facility that could be completed in the 2030's at Daejeon under the leadership of South Korea's National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI).

South Korea is currently developing the Korea superconducting Tokamak advanced research project and is also contributing to ITER the $20 billion experimental fusion reactor now being built in Cadarache, France by an international team.

K-DEMO is expected to be the first fusion reactor to contribute power to the grid, and will be able to take advantage with experience gained in building ITER. It will serve as the prototype for the development of fusion reactors and, according to PPPL, will generate a billion watts of power for several weeks, which is a much greater output than ITER's goal of producing 500 million watts for 500 seconds by the late 2020's.

Earlier in 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 ten years. This would establish the know-how to permit the construction of the commercial fusion power plant between 2022 and 2036. The government also announced that it planned to invest over $940 million in the project. According to the ministry, $274 million of the amount has already been funded. The project is expected to employ about 2,400 people in the first phase, which will last through 2016.

A research fellow at NFRI and former chairman of the ITER management advisory committee, Lee Gyung-Su, said that Korea is desperately in need of the energy that fusion could provide. "Korea has a lack of energy resources. The population density is high, and the country consumes so much energy. We have a different perspective on fusion energy compared to the U.S."

ITER has experienced problems, which Lee says were of a management, rather than a technical nature. But the concept of fusion energy has its critics who doubt that it will be feasible to produce commercial energy due to the very high energy inputs needed. Others feel that South Korea would be better off investing in more accessible technologies to meet its energy hunger. For related Information, see January 24, 2013, article -First Fusion Reactor Moves Closer

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