South Korea has become the sixth nation in the world to acquire a cutting-edge nuclear fusion reactor.

The National Fusion Research Center at the Korea Basic Science Institute in Daejeon says it has completed construction of the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Reactor (KSTAR) after 12 years of research and development.

The KSTAR is a magnetic fusion device intended to study aspects of magnetic fusion energy which could be applied to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project South Korea joined in 2003.

The KSTAR project was approved in 1995, but construction was delayed by the East Asian financial crisis which weakened the South Korean economy considerably.

With the completion of the new reactor, South Korea has become the sixth nation in the world to acquire nuclear fusion technology after the United States, Russia, China, Japan and the European Union.

Superconducting nuclear fusion refers to a process that uses hot plasma in a sealed vacuum chamber to combine deuterium and tritium, which makes them into heavier particles and generates massive amounts of energy.

The process that mimics stellar power generation could allow three hundredths of a gram of deuterium to generate power equivalent to 300 liters of gasoline.