South Korean researchers have maintained plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius for 48 seconds inside a tokamak fusion reactor.
Such a breakthrough could one day help curb climate change if companies can scale up the technology to a commercial level in the coming decades.
Ions inside a compact fusion reactor barely a meter across have been heated to the magic figure of 100 million degrees Celsius for the first time in a monumental step towards making nuclear fusion energy a practical reality.
In a new world record, China's "artificial sun" project has sustained a nuclear fusion reaction for more than 17 min. Superheated plasma reached almost 70 million degrees C— that's roughly five times hotter than the sun.
The KSTAR, a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion t over 100 mil degrees.
SPARC is planned to be the first experimental device ever to achieve a 'burning plasma' -- a self-sustaining fusion reaction in which different isotopes of the element hydrogen fuse together to form helium.
The Chinese EAST reactor team was able to integrate four types of heating power in order to reach a new temperature record - a cloud of charged particles that contained electrons heated to more than 100 million °C.
The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is close to hitting sustainable nuclear fusion (generating more energy than is initially required to start the reaction).
