Korea Brings U.S. Design to Life

Abstract

ENERGY RESEARCHSEOUL-- Last fall, South Korean officials began ground preparations for the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) facility, a scaled-down version of the $750 million Tokamak Physics Experiment--a fusion research facility originally slated for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory that the U.S. Congress killed in 1995 in an economy move. Despite the country's worst economic crisis in more than 40 years, the Korean government is backing KSTAR because it believes the project will stimulate industrial R&D at the same time that it catapults Korea into the front ranks of fusion science.