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South Korea’s artificial Sun ran for 102 seconds and it could change the future of energy
(timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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Technology
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You can just say fusion reactor
The article, like so many others concerning nuclear technology, refused to address the unit cost of energy.
Why is building a large, complex, and temperamental fusion engine more economical than churning out an equivalent number of wind turbines or solar panels? The article doesn't say
For the same reason someone would have asked "why is building a large, complex and hard to produce solar panel more economical than churning out an equivalent number of coal plants?" decades ago.
It's improving the tech, which could eventually far and away outpaced every other energy producer. Maybe not now, but in the future. Some are just gung-ho about trying to produce a bunch when they're not quite ready.
Why would you create another source of heat instead of harnessing incoming one? Also your comparison is a little bit off. This tech will be large, complex, hard to produce compared to solar just because of its nature.
The Times of India is a rag that literally accepts bribes for positive coverage; sensationalist garbage is their bread and butter.
But it gets worse: this story is over two years out-of-date.
This happened back in 2024. Here's a paper.
I remember reading about russian intelligence sponsored anti vaccine propaganda from the time of india, targeting poor countries like pakistan and in africa and the like.
Technological progress.
Need sun for solar, so won’t work well for space when you get further out, and no wind in space.
But there is an air and space museum.
A single solar panel is basically useless. You need a huge field of them per small city, and by the time you do have your huge fields of wind and solar, you then need giant grid batteries, and you still often fall short, which means that to be safe you need to double or triple your solar and wind build out.
Which is why most solar and wind projects are backed up with methane burning generators.
Nuclear on the other hand, takes up a tiny fraction of the space and outputs orders of magnitude more power, safer and cleaner than any other form of energy.
South Korea doesn't have a lot of land mass for solar, they do however have competent engineers and scientists.
Fun fact, most of the fearmongering around nuclear has been paid for by oil companies, starting with Hermann J. Muller working for the Rockefeller Foundation, to Robert O. Anderson, CEO of ARCO giving $200K to a man to start an anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth. The Rockefeller Foundation directly funded Greenpeace up until just a few years ago.
As for Fusion, yeah, we can sustain a reaction by feeding energy in, and sometimes, we can observe more energy out than in, but we have absolutely zero ways to capture that energy.
Water+heat = steam = power
Solar actually overtook nuclear as least-killy-per-gigawatt about a year (maybe even two, now) ago, although obviously killing people isn't the only bad thing a system of power generation can do.
It's not hard to overtake nuclear when we're shutting nuclear down. Thankfully that trend is reversing, because if we had a full nuclear build out, we wouldn't really need anything else.
Especially SMRs, those are quite amazing, well, amazing for something that just heats water to make steam to drive a turbine.
It doesn't.
Fusion isn't as bad as fission or fossil fuel. If they can get it to work. The reactor needs to run continuously (for days) and the energy output needs to be positive. Then it would have a huge impact.
Every energy source as its drawbacks. I.e. Solar panels and wind have the recycling of compound materials issue - it's all glued together. And the environmental impact of source materials production, i.e. neodymium. Mining, refining,...
Some are worse than others. But none is or will be impact free in terms of sustainability or environmental destruction.
(Not my field. The following is armchair speculation.)
TLDR — It’s not. For distributed/residential, bulk power generation, and light-duty transportation, solar has already won so decisively that fusion is not likely to catch up this century. But those aren’t usually the target applications.
TMK, Fusion offers most of the known advantages of fission (smaller footprint, superior energy density + capacity, output that’s weather-independent and geography-agnostic, etc.) but with significantly better safety and waste profiles.
Its versatility as a thermal source enables many industrial applications requiring temperatures difficult or impossible to achieve via electrification alone.
The reaction itself is directly applicable to neutron production.
There’s some even more far flung applications like outer planetary and deepspace space travel.
And others. All to say, it’s for niche and future applications PV can’t touch.
That's fair. I guess if you really need a spicy blowtorch...
The obvious advantages would be less land use, great for smaller nations, and on demand power without the need to build back-up batteries.
Plus those are the immediate benefits who knows what we could do with that level of power generation. Maybe we could even make better space craft if the technology advances enough
You still need to boil water and turn a turbine with fusion, don’t you? Not something that works well in a space craft. Could the plasma be used in propulsion directly somehow?
I'm just imagining a steampunk spacecraft running on fusion now tbh
That would be wild. Something for a vidya game for someone with more artistic talent and free time than me
Because there's currently only one place that should theoretically be able to create one that works at scale to become energy positive, thanks to a novel way of making the electromagnets used to contain the plasma under enough pressure. As per usual, a beneficial reactor tech is still "five years out". We do keep inching closer though.
Yeah, fusion reactors are nothing new, as for why it's because they are not self sustaining and release less radiation, the problem with renewable energy is the availability and instability, that's why most countries don't allow more than a certain percentage of renewable energy into the grid.
Artificial sun sounds fun tho. Let us have our God damn fucking whimsy. The world is bleak enough.
I've just been reading this article over and over again since the 1980s. We're way past whimsy and on to scammy pseudo science
Wind and solar can't get us free of CO2 yet.
Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in EU power supply
This is the problem, this idea of 100% carbon free or "whelp, might as well give up and burn coal".
We will always need buffers to grids of solar and wind power, they point is we are reducing outputs significantly, aiming for a range the planet can deal with.
Funny for an ecologist to admit that you don't care about climate change if nuclear power is can be ended.
For your interest, it's at least 20 years that renewables do absolutely nothing for CO2 emissions. Meanwhile nuclear power is carbon free since the 70's.