The South Korean artificial sun, which goes by the name KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research), has made an important scientific discovery concerning nuclear fusion by being able to sustain plasma in high-confinement mode for a period of 102 seconds while simultaneously managing to keep plasma temperature at 100 million degrees centigrade for 48 seconds. This development by the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) is another move towards achieving clean fusion energy, whose ability to generate unlimited amounts of electricity with little to no carbon emission is promising.
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.
Solar engines have historically been simple and easy to produce relative to coal and gas engines. We’ve had industrial solar heating technology since the 19th century, even. Sort of the joke of fossil fuel technology, in that it’s been a consequence of heavy R&D investment and industrial build out as much by choice as by any engineering advantage.
It’s been a pop science empty promise for decades. We were talking about fusion technology in the 1960s like it was just around the corner. Yes, there’s an enormous amount of output in fusion technology. But it requires even more energy input. What’s more - as the article downplays but is forced to concede - it is highly unstable and difficult to sustain, even at a super-sized laboratory setting.
This is a far cry from fission which can be achieved practically by accident (see the Chicago Pile-1) and is comparatively straightforward to control via mechanical methods.
Even in the event you manage to produce something approaching stable fusion at the size-scale necessary for industrial deployment, there’s still no reason to believe the technology would be cheaper per watt than the indirect capture of an already running supermassive fusion system (ie, the Sun). In that case, it wouldn’t outpace every other energy producer for the same reason conventional nuclear power hasn’t.
Meanwhile solar and wind have been funded generously for decades but still can’t get us free of fossile fuels.
Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in EU power supply