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.

You can just say fusion reactor

The Times of India is a rag that literally accepts bribes for positive coverage; sensationalist garbage is their bread and butter.

But it gets worse: this story is over two years out-of-date.

The KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) announced on the 20th that during the '2023 KSTAR Plasma Campaign' conducted from December of last year to February of this year [2024], it achieved a 48-second operation of ultra-high-temperature plasma at an ion temperature of 100 million degrees and a record 102-second operation in high-confinement mode (H-mode).

This happened back in 2024. Here's a paper.

Technological progress.

Need sun for solar, so won’t work well for space when you get further out, and no wind in space.

A single solar panel is basically useless. You need a huge field of them per small city, and by the time you do have your huge fields of wind and solar, you then need giant grid batteries, and you still often fall short, which means that to be safe you need to double or triple your solar and wind build out.

Which is why most solar and wind projects are backed up with methane burning generators.

Nuclear on the other hand, takes up a tiny fraction of the space and outputs orders of magnitude more power, safer and cleaner than any other form of energy.

South Korea doesn't have a lot of land mass for solar, they do however have competent engineers and scientists.

Fun fact, most of the fearmongering around nuclear has been paid for by oil companies, starting with Hermann J. Muller working for the Rockefeller Foundation, to Robert O. Anderson, CEO of ARCO giving $200K to a man to start an anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth. The Rockefeller Foundation directly funded Greenpeace up until just a few years ago.

As for Fusion, yeah, we can sustain a reaction by feeding energy in, and sometimes, we can observe more energy out than in, but we have absolutely zero ways to capture that energy.

It doesn't.

Fusion isn't as bad as fission or fossil fuel. If they can get it to work. The reactor needs to run continuously (for days) and the energy output needs to be positive. Then it would have a huge impact.

Every energy source as its drawbacks. I.e. Solar panels and wind have the recycling of compound materials issue - it's all glued together. And the environmental impact of source materials production, i.e. neodymium. Mining, refining,...

Some are worse than others. But none is or will be impact free in terms of sustainability or environmental destruction.

(Not my field. The following is armchair speculation.)

Why is [fusion] more economical than [solar/wind]

The obvious advantages would be less land use, great for smaller nations, and on demand power without the need to build back-up batteries.

Plus those are the immediate benefits who knows what we could do with that level of power generation. Maybe we could even make better space craft if the technology advances enough

Because there's currently only one place that should theoretically be able to create one that works at scale to become energy positive, thanks to a novel way of making the electromagnets used to contain the plasma under enough pressure. As per usual, a beneficial reactor tech is still "five years out". We do keep inching closer though.

Artificial sun sounds fun tho. Let us have our God damn fucking whimsy. The world is bleak enough.

Yeah, fusion reactors are nothing new, as for why it's because they are not self sustaining and release less radiation, the problem with renewable energy is the availability and instability, that's why most countries don't allow more than a certain percentage of renewable energy into the grid.

Wind and solar can't get us free of CO2 yet.