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'Star In a Jar' Fusion Reactor Works, Promises Infinite Energy (space.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: For several decades now, scientists from around the world have been pursuing a ridiculously ambitious goal: They hope to develop a nuclear fusion reactor that would generate energy in the same manner as the sun and other stars, but down here on Earth. Incorporated into terrestrial power plants, this "star in a jar" technology would essentially provide Earth with limitless clean energy, forever. And according to new reports out of Europe this week, we just took another big step toward making it happen. In a study published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, researchers confirmed that Germany's Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device is on track and working as planned. The space-age system, known as a stellerator, generated its first batch of hydrogen plasma when it was first fired up earlier this year. The new tests basically give scientists the green light to proceed to the next stage of the process. It works like this: Unlike a traditional fission reactor, which splits atoms of heavy elements to generate energy, a fusion reactor works by fusing the nuclei of lighter atoms into heavier atoms. The process releases massive amounts of energy and produces no radioactive waste. The "fuel" used in a fusion reactor is simple hydrogen, which can be extracted from water. The W7-X device confines the plasma within magnetic fields generated by superconducting coils cooled down to near absolute zero. The plasma -- at temperatures upwards of 80 million degrees Celsius -- never comes into contact with the walls of the containment chamber. Neat trick, that. David Gates, principal research physicist for the advanced projects division of PPPL, leads the agency's collaborative efforts in regard to the W7-X project. In an email exchange from his offices at Princeton, Gates said the latest tests verify that the W7-X magnetic "cage" is working as planned. "This lays the groundwork for the exciting high-performance plasma operations expected in the near future," Gates said.
Article says "Topology of magnetic field confirmed."
they still haven't powered the thing up. they still don't know if it will work. headlines like this make me want to slap the writer across the face with a bowling ball in a string bag until they stop lying. and then a few more times just to make sure the lesson sticks.
Well, here is a quick calculation (I hope I'm not off too far). The tritium is bred from lithium, so essentially free. Deuterium is about $7/g and that yields about 100 MWh in fusion energy. To get the same amount of energy out of burning coal, you need about 50 tons, or about $2500 worth of coal.
it still produces lots of radioactive waste.
Fusion produces less waste than fission, and it is shorter lived. But it doesn't help with the political problems. The Greenies and NIMBYs are going to oppose fusion just like they oppose fission.
There are other articles on other science sites that read better. This particular fusion system is a stellerator, a type that is currently looking to be the best of our experimental fusion systems for several reasons, not the least of which is that it doesn't have the same leakage and containment vessel damage, a huge problem with tokamaks.
Of course saying unlimited or infinite energy are just hyperbole, though it would have a lot of advantages over normal power generation methods.
It's a bullshit term.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
A misandric definition of being condescending recently created by the feminist community.
And yes, if a woman does the same thing, it's still called mansplaining because of internalized misogyny due to toxic masculinity.
Normally tritium is horribly expansive because very rare ($30000 per grams...). That would be a killer cost for fusion reactor. So a blanket of Lithium is added to the vessel, and the neutron hitting it, produce tritium and helium. That is where the "tritium is bred from lithium, so essentially free" from parent post come from.
Apparently, design of stellarator is too complicated for human mind. Proper positioning of magnetic coils has to be simulated on a supercomputer. Only the recent advancements in computer technology allowed to make stellarators more efficient than tokamaks.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/bizarre-reactor-might-save-nuclear-fusion
Is this an advertisement to invest in yet another unlimited free energy scam? Wake me up when some progress occurs.
Yes it is an advertisement, you can buy one of these off the shelf next week.
And Yes it is a scam. because all prestigious research institutes do nothing but produce free energy scams.
And Yes confirmation that the physical device matches theoretical modelling is not "progress" either.
Maybe we should do an academic study on how using the word fusion makes people's brains devolve to a state of uneducated retardedness.
Fusion never!
Fusion funding plot:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png
The small amount of plasma is confined using magnetic forces.
If they lose containment, the pressure and temperature on the plasma reduce significantly and the reaction no longer takes place. There is no runaway scenario AFAIK.
I have been down the hall from a tokamak when it is firing. I have also walked next to a tokamak when it is off. I have crawled through stellarator rings. These things are not scary, they are impressive.
Summary dumbed down to the level needed for a six year old to understand it.
It's written as if people here have never heard of fusion before.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
The large oil companies have at least $50 billion invested in renewable energy. Google it.
You mentioned storage technology and wind. Here's example news from just one week last year. Total SA, the French oil supermajor, spent $1.1 billion to buy the battery maker Saft Groupe SA, complementing its 2011 purchase of a majority stake in the solar-panel maker SunPower Corp on a Monday. The next day, Canadian pipeline company Enbridge Inc. it would pay $218 million for stakes in offshore wind farms as it attempts to double its low-carbon generating capacity.