KSTAR will be one of the first research tokamaks in the world to feature fully superconducting magnets, which again will be of great relevance to ITER as this will also use SC magnets. The KSTAR magnet system consists of 16 niobium-tin direct currenttoroidal field magnets, 10 niobium-tin alternating currentpoloidal field magnets and 4 niobium-titanium alternating current poloidal field magnets. It is planned that the reactor will study plasma pulses of up to 20 seconds duration until 2011, when it will be upgraded to study pulses of up to 300 seconds duration. The reactor vessel will have a major radius of 1.8 m, a minor radius of 0.5 m, a maximum toroidal field of 3.5 Tesla, and a maximum plasma current of 2 megaampere. As with other tokamaks, heating and current drive will be initiated using neutral beam injection, ion cyclotron resonance heating, radio frequency heating and electron cyclotron resonance heating. Initial heating power will be 8 megawatt from neutral beam injection upgradeable to 24 MW, 6 MW from ICRH upgradeable to 12 MW, and at present undetermined heating power from ECRH and RF heating. The experiment will use both hydrogen and deuterium fuels but not the deuterium-tritium mix which will be studied in ITER. In December 2016, KSTAR set a world record by confining and maintaining a high-temperature hydrogen plasma for 70 seconds. The record was broken by China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in July 2017.
2011 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 5.2 seconds, Temperature: ~50 K, successfully fully deterred ELM, first ever in the World.
2012 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 17 seconds, Temperature: 50 K
2013 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 20 seconds, Temperature: 50 K
2014 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 45 seconds, and successfully fully deterred ELM for 5 seconds.
2015 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 55 seconds, Temperature: 50 K
2016 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 70 seconds, Temperature: 50 K, and successfully made ITB-mode for 7 secs.
2017 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 72 seconds, Temperature: 70 K, and successfully fully deterred ELM for 34 seconds, with using 9.5 MW heating system.
2019 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 1.5 seconds, Temperature: >100 K.
2020 - Maintained high-temperature plasma for 8 seconds, Temperature: >100 K
