A fusion reactor for South Korea

Partner will be the US Department of Energy.

South Korea has begun design development for a fusion power demonstration reactor provisionally named “Korean Demonstration Fusion Power Plant, K-DEMO.” The reactor will be located at Daejeon.

Spearheading the project will be South Korea’s National Fusion Research Institute. The US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey will collaborate on the project, which is scheduled for completion in 2030.

K-DEMO should bring Korea a step closer to the construction of commercial fusion reactors, and is going to be the first fusion plant that will contribute to the grid.

South Korea is already involved in two major international projects: Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (K-STAR) and the ITER, where an experimental reactor is being built.

K-DEMO is expected to generate around 1 billion watts of power for several weeks. This output will be much bigger than the anticipated one coming from ITER in the late 2020s.