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PPPL joins forces with NFRI on K-DEMO project

While ITER is a joint effort, many countries including EU, China, Japan and India are already contemplating their own demonstration facilities as the next step toward commercial fusion power. Korea is also doing so with K-DEMO, the next generation reactor as the successor of their K-STAR reactor, a superconducting tokamak that is currently experimenting with long pulse AT mode operation.

South Korea's National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) will fund a pre-conceptual design study with the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) for K-DEMO, the reactor that should become Korea's conceptual demonstration fusion power plant, comparable in size to ITER.

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Sketch of K-DEMO design, copyright South Korea's National Fusion Research Institute

K-DEMO construction has yet to be approved by the South Korean Government but could be completed in the 2030s and should build further upon the K-STAR operation results.

Plans for the cooperation with PPPL include engineering analysis of K-DEMO design concepts, including the size and shape of the K-DEMO tokamak and the strength of the magnetic fields that will create and control the plasma.

K-DEMO will be a two-stage project. The first stage, called K-DEMO 1, will develop components for the second stage, K-DEMO 2, to produce fusion energy and generate electricity.

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Sketch of the EU's DEMO reactor as successor of ITER.

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