Will "Nuclear Fusion Dream" succeed in the U.K. team up with Seoul National University?

[Anchor]
With many countries fiercely competing to build the world's fastest commercial nuclear fusion power plant, Korean researchers' high-temperature superconducting magnets have participated in the UK national fusion project.

Superconductors are essential materials for nuclear fusion, and attention is focused on the success of the business.

I'm reporter Jang A-young.

[Reporter]
Safe without explosion risk, clean without waste, infinite dream energy technology to raw materials, fusion.

In terms of research and development history, nuclear fusion, which is the same principle as the source of life solar energy, is still a difficult challenge even more than 80 years later.

If you look at the ongoing international fusion reactor construction project, ITER, it is creating a magnetic field with magnets strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier, creating a fusion furnace weighing three Eiffel Towels to trap plasma at 100 million°C.

It is a huge project that costs 20 trillion won and takes nearly 40 years to build.

However, in 2019, a breakthrough was made that could drastically reduce the size and cost of nuclear fusion reactors.

A "high-temperature superconducting magnet" was developed that generates a magnetic field three times stronger than that of the data business, is very small at 390g, and operates at minus 173℃, 100℃ higher than the absolute temperature.

[Han Seung-yong / Professor of Electrical Information Engineering at Seoul National University] After the emergence of high-temperature superconducting technology as a technology that shows the possibility of miniaturization, I think paradoxically what I feel is that the human will to this clean energy seems to be this much hope. Since the Commonwealth Fusion System (CFS), more than 40 startups, if not all superconducting, have been identified worldwide.]

The British Atomic Energy Agency has noticed Professor Han Seung-yong's superconducting magnet, which opened the door to accelerating nuclear fusion.

Seoul National University has decided to use this magnet developed by Seoul National University for a U.K. national project aimed at building a nuclear fusion power plant that can actually supply power to 200,000 households by 2040.

[Andrew Bowie / UK Undersecretary for Energy Security and Carbon Neutrality: The plan to provide electricity through fusion by 2040 will become a reality. It will come true in the UK before anywhere else in the world.

This is because Seoul National University has a high-temperature superconducting magnet to face its rival U.S. start-ups, and Korea is important in forming supply chains around the world.

[Ezat Nasr / Head of STEP (Nuclear Fusion Power Generation) Constraint Division, UK: The main reason for our cooperation with Seoul National University is that a team of professors is leading the world in certain areas of high temperature superconducting magnet (HTS) technology required for our power plants. Furthermore, for nuclear fusion power plants to be maintained commercially, they must stimulate the supply chain (nuclear fusion) as well as prove new technologies.]

An era in which both the climate crisis and energy demand must be solved at the same time.

The world's eyes are on whether the project, in which Britain joined hands with Seoul National University to commercialize nuclear fusion, which seemed impossible, will actually produce results.

I'm YTN's Jang Ayoung.

Reporter for filming
: Kwak Young-joo
Design: Ji Kyung-yoon