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Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor (sciencemag.org)
New submitter insitus writes: On 10 December, Germany's new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 billion. Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium—an unreactive gas—so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy.
great Jazz Fusion band name.
we start polluting outer space... lovely...
Is this a story from Futurama?
In all of the test fusion reactors I have seen there appears to be no mechanism to draw off the "excess" energy for use in power production. They all seem to be sealed units. So what are the conceptual ideas for taking the energy out from a fusion reactor?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor
Could at least give a hint as to what's so bizarre about it in the summary.
Y'know, as opposed to all those boring run-of-the-mill fusion reactors...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
FTA: "This story was originally published online on 21 October and in the 23 October issue of Science. It has been updated with new information."
And yes, this story was on Slashdot then.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Not good.
Everyone's going to say that it's finally the Mr Fusion from Back to the Future. Noooo. It's Das Mister Fusion. It's German.
They are in fact older than tokamaks, as an idea to obtain controlled fusion. I guess that 60 years of technological progress is prompting people to look into them again.
something like this really shows the merit in the phrase "German engineering". German, and the rest of Europe, are truly the leaders in development of new technology in the 21st century. The whole world is wishing you the best of luck with the results of this experiment.
why is it bizarre , in words a 4 year old or a republican born again congress critter can understand.
I should have wikied before I posted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy.
And nothing ever went wrong with Germany using a "bizarre" technology involving hydrogen. :)
if you haven't heard much about the "stellarator", the twisted design is actually a resulting design from an evolutionary algorithm.
robotic evolution will happen quickly.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Instead of an easily-described geometry like "spherical" or "toroidal", this has a Lovecraftian "unnameable" geometry.
Nothing says success like the juxtaposition of "Germany" and "technological innovation involving a hydrogen filled container".
Am I understanding correctly in likening the twisted plasma flow in this reactor design to how a twisted-pair cable works?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Check out our working fusion reactor that's a lot smaller and works better, and way cheaper.
It's on UW Seattle campus.
I'll bet the German one has emissions they're hiding.
(do your own search)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
https://twitter.com/PlasmaphysikIPP/status/674937504009711616
What I don't understand is how they plan to heat a gas to 100 million degrees centigrade.. or what materials they're using to contain it. Most metals have a melting point of between 2500 and 3500 degrees centigrade. Even assuming the superheated gas doesn't directly touch the structural components, convection would surely still heat any containing material to its melting point. What are they using to contain it?
So that really hot Vril chick with the long hair has come back.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I really hope it works well and produces abundant energy. But just why is the US not ahead on this type of reactor? Is it political or do we lack the ability?
> A completely new class of nuclear energy is not a project that a single nation, or a handful thereof, could hope to accomplish.
It's interesting you would say that. One country developed the first class of nuclear energy (kaboom), then developed "a completely new class of nuclear energy" again when they built the first nuclear power plants (1951), then miniaturized them to fit in submarines (1958), then created a whole new class again for space probes, etc. What makes it impossible for the country that has achieved most of the nuclear breakthroughs to achieve the next one?
Sure, the US has declined vis-a-vis other nations in the last few years, but I don't see any reason that must be either permanent or mean that they can no longer lead in -any- area. One strong leader like Kennedy or Reagan could make a huge difference, you know, someone who would actually LEAD.
i have been thinking about this too.
i have asked this also but alas nobody gave a explanation and i assumed
that they are just hunting for another heat-source for their thermodynamic machines -aka- steam generator.
but there is this MHD thingy and it got me thinking a bit.
normally we just heat up the universe and hope that heat is not uniformly distributed already and the machines can keep working (universe death).
and then i thought abit what makes this fusion thing different from other electricity sources:
we have battery, lemons and potatoes and thus chemical potential which kindda is like atomic and molecular electricity.
we have coils and magnets which spin or something and then make electricity
we have semiconductors to extract light energy (solar panels) -or- temperature difference to get electrons flowing in a pipe.
but fusion is different:
imagine for a moment a loop.
it has a left and a right side (or a top and bottom, whatever).
in the loop water is flowing.
we lay the loop so that one side it higher then the other in a gravity field and it will flow down. like water in a dam.
but now just lay it flat and let us assume for a moment that there are TWO kinds of water molecules:
a big one and a small one. you can transform a big one into a small one.
so let's further assume, on the left side of the loop we can transform a "big" water molecule into a small one.
what happens now is that there is "less" water on the left side (it has small molecules and displaces less space)
thus more water from the right side will want to flow to the left side.
if we can extract these smaller molecules "somehow" we can keep adding big molecules on the right and they will
be "sucked" to the left side all by themselves.
now let's change "small" and "big" water molecules to hydrogen plasma and helium plasma. ...
of course helium is a "big molecule" and hydrogen is smaller then helium but because a fusion
device transforms or crunches atoms, which are matter, into energy there is less matter after the crunch
so i assume there will be a limit to the amount of direct electricity extraction from a fusion device, leaving the heat inside
the machine to make more helium but just extracting electricity.
so the funny part is, that you HAVE to connect a "load" to the "cruncher" else it will not work, thus one could argue that the "load" is actually powering the fusion device.
so in a strange sense, the electric energy LOSS by a load, say a household, is dumped INTO the "cruncher" to enable the closed circuit for the plasma holding magnets which then lift it back out of "debt".
the point to remember is that helium from fused hydrogen in the same space displaces LESS, as a gas and as a source of magnetic fields, thus like transforming bigger water molecules in a pipe into smaller ones, thus creating a kind of "suction", sucking the electricity from the household or load ^_^ (of course it doesn't matter which way it flows it just has to flow).
might this work?
captcha: absents
"German Physicists Create Fusion With This Bizzare Trick"
McDonald's had this figured out _years_ ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_N'_Tasty#/media/File:McDLT_Packaging.jpg
That's actually why I put the date (1951) in parentheses, to hopefully give a hint to the person who would make that mistake. The US powered a city from a nuclear power plant in 1951. The ussr did so in 1954, making the US first by three years.
...and opened up a gateway to hell!
That instead of cutting edge its bizarre.
Always a winning combination.
So let's review:
ray> the first nuclear power plants (1951)
dunkel>Actually, the first actual nuclear power plant was built in the USSR
ray> 1951
dunkel> that (USA) went online in 1951 hasn't powered a city, just the facility [meaning it powered the entire campus]. So yes, that one was the first for the Soviets.[?!?!?]
It seems to me that a nuclear reactor which provides electricity for the the buildings around it would be called ... a nuclear power plant.
Your words, not mine. You don't know the difference between a building (by no means the full campus, just the light bulbs in the reactor building were powered) and a city. You also don't know the difference between a bloody military breeding reactor where the usage of some of its waste heat was added as an afterthought and an actual purpose-built nuclear power plant connected to an actual power grid.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You need to be really delusional to claim that this soviet reactor was built for the purpose to "power a city" and not as a breeder. It was a breeder to build nuclear weapons. Production of electricity was just a useful side effect.
Because oil companies and the trolls they pay to write articles hate it?