'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.

Comments

Re:modern journalism

[Tough Love]

The headline is misleading crap and the summary is embarrassing puff piece for dummies, who apparently are not expected to know what nuclear fusion is. (Hmm, is there anybody reading this site who doesn't know that? If so, you need to go back to your fake Facebook news, Zuck is missing you.)

The project is real enough and it's exciting, as in, it's a fusion design concept that has not yet hit the wall. As far as I can tell, the Wendelstein 7-X is not expected to achieve ignition, much less energy break-even or commercial viability, rather it is intended to demonstrate that a plasma can be sustained over a long period (30 minutes) above ignition temperature (somewhere around 100 million degrees). That's exciting. However, there is no particular new news about this. Wikipedia lists a timeline item of Hydrogen plasma at 80 million degrees for 0.25s. As far as I can tell, the device is currently all apart, being upgraded in advance of a new series of tests that should achieve that, following successful plasma confinement tests early this year. That's all we know. No new news... probably no new news until sometime in the new year. More or less on track, it would seem. Given the sad history of over promising and under delivering in the fusion sector, it is understandable and laudable that the we aren't seeing a lot of breathless predictions from the project. Assuming that Wendelstein 7-X proves something about practicality of the stellarator approach, I assume the next step would be funding for a fancier one. Eventually, the might prove that ITER should be a stellarator and not a tokamak. Who knows. It does not feel like free energy for everyone in the immediate future, but it does feel like progress.

Re:Reads Like An Ad

[TheRaven64]

I'm in my 50s, and I've been hearing that practical fusion generators were only 10-15 years off since I was a little nerdling

There was an article a few years back that put these in perspective. They pointed out that N years in the future really means $M dollars more spending in the future and that these predictions have been quite consistent: if we'd kept funding at the anticipated rate in the '60s, we might have working fusion already.