9 ms·
Livestream of Wendelstein 7-X Stellerator being turned on
- iokevins 11y agoFrom Wikipedia: The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator (nuclear fusion reactor) built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik (IPP), and completed in October 2015. It is a further development of Wendelstein 7-AS. The purpose of Wendelstein 7-X is to evaluate the main components of a future fusion reactor built using stellarator technology, even if Wendelstein 7-X itself is not an economical fusion power plant. The Wendelstein 7-X reactor is the largest fusion device created using the stellarator concept which was the brainchild of physicist Lyman Spitzer. It is planned to operate with up to 30 minutes of continuous plasma discharge, demonstrating an essential feature of a future power plant: continuous operation. The name of the project, referring to the mountain Wendelstein in Bavaria, was decided at the end of the 1950s, referencing the preceding project from Princeton University under the name Project Matterhorn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
- anc84 11y ago> Fehler: Die Webseite 'www.ipp.mpg.de' ist momentan nicht verfügbar
- dalbin 11y agoDirect access to the stream : http://webcast.nc3-cdn.com/clients/mpg/2016/02/03/en/ http://webcast.nc3-cdn.com/clients/mpg/2016/02/03/en/
- mariuolo 11y agoAm I missing something or the actual turning on was not shown? Perhaps later today?
- cos2pi 11y ago> You can follow the event per livestream on 3 February 2016 at 2.45 p.m. CET. The program should begin at any time. EDIT: Err, CET... UTC+1. So, perhaps it is over?
- ajmurmann 11y agoYeah, it should have started almost an hour ago and actually be just about over.
- superkuh 11y agoIt was shown. It lasted for a bit less than a second. They are not running it longer right now because they cannot handle the thermal load.
- mariuolo 11y agoWell, it's on youtube. Will check again, thanks.
- mabbo 11y agoThe tl;dr of this is that if the Wendelstein works, and works well, we're potentially only a few years away from building a fusion reactor that generates large amounts of clean power at extremely low cost. If it doesn't work, well, they'll keep trying. It's like when SpaceX landed that rocket over the ocean (without a barge) then let it crash- if they succeed, the cool stuff comes next.
- celticninja 11y agoim not sure they let it crash, i think that bit was an accident.
- maxerickson 11y agoThey didn't stick a barge under it for the early tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_booster_landing_tests#Ocean_water_test_descents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_booster_landing_tests...
- maaku 11y agoDifferent event.
- petra 11y agoBetween this, and moltex , which claims to have designed an intrinsically safe molten-salt nuclear reactor same capital costs of coal, hence cheaper than coal , the future of clean energy look bright.
- mng2 11y ago>we're potentially only a few years away The press loves to hype this sort of thing but I think if you talk to most scientists in the field they'll be much more circumspect about getting to commercial fusion. Personally I think it's at least twenty years out, and that's if everything goes well, which it will not.
- dest 11y agoPictures of amazing W7X magnets, if I am not mistaken https://imgur.com/a/We3fk https://imgur.com/a/We3fk
- lorenzhs 11y agoFor anyone tuning in now, the event is already over, and German media report that it was a success. I can't find a decent English-language source yet, surely there will be reports on it soon. Most of the German articles have lots of immediately obvious inaccuracies as well right now... EDIT: There's another post on the front page right now that has a recording of the event: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/watch-germany-switch-their-experimental-fusion-reactor-live http://www.iflscience.com/physics/watch-germany-switch-their... discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11026559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11026559
- pmontra 11y agoThe video is in English. You can skip to about 38:00 and watch the ignition sequence and listen to some explanations from the speaker.
- maremmano 11y agoapparently it worked: https://translate.google.it/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=it&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeit.de%2Fwissen%2F2016-02%2Fwendelstein-7-x-wasserstoff-plasma-greifswald&edit-text= https://translate.google.it/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...
- lorenzhs 11y agoThere's an egregious mistranslation in there. In a section where nuclear fusion is compared to fission, the German article reads Das ist ungefährlicher und hinterlässt weniger stark verstrahlten Atommüll the translation is This is dangerous and leaves less severely contaminated nuclear waste whereas it should be This is *less* dangerous and leaves less strongly contaminated nuclear waste The translation completely negated the sentence. The rest is pretty okay-ish.
- bassislife 11y agoless dangerous? or "not more" dangerous?
- captainmuon 11y agoliterally more non-dangerous
- Eduard 11y agoliterally "safer"
- DasIch 11y agoSafer has a connotation of safety whereas ungefährlicher has a connotation of danger. If something that would have killed you before, is less likely to do so now you would call it ungefährlicher or less dangerous but you wouldn't call it safer unless you're intending to be funny.
- numlocked 11y agoI've read a lot about the design and construction of the 7-X, but I've never read why there are so many "portholes" all over the thing. There are a comically large number of them, everywhere, of totally different sizes, shapes, and at weird angles. Why are so many holes/ports necessary, and why is there so little homogeneity?
- sbierwagen 11y agoIt's an experimental device, the ports are needed for instrumentation. A utility-scale fusor would have many fewer of them. The ITER vacuum vessel also looks pretty funny, though much more symmetrical: https://www.iter.org/mach/vacuumvessel https://www.iter.org/mach/vacuumvessel The ITER design is also dramatically complicated by the need to have robots fit in there to replace blanket modules.
- db48x 11y agoIt's a scientific instrument, not a power plant. The portholes are to allow all the measurements and tests that they plan to do over the life of the machine.
- the8472 11y ago> Why are so many holes/ports necessary It's designed to be maintained from the inside. So you need to get replacement/upgrade/experiment parts inside where you need them. > and why is there so little homogeneity? stellarators are highly asymmetrical
- theoh 11y agoIt does appear to have five-fold rotational symmetry, at least in the way the coils are distributed.
- Geee 11y agoTime-lapse video of the building process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJpSrqitSMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJpSrqitSMQ
- thrownaway2424 11y agoHow do you take energy off one of these?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sbierwagen 11y agoJust by using it as a regular heat source to boil water, then running the steam through turbines, like any other thermal power plant. There are schemes to convert charged particle flux directly into electricity, but I'm not aware of any fusion power experiments that use them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
- thrownaway2424 11y agoThat was a little bit vague. How does the heat actually get out of this thing and into the water? If the plasma is confined in a magnetic field, not in contact with the shell, and the shell is super-cooled to 4K, I'm a little lost on how it would work in practice.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoThe plasma is confined but its glow is not.
- avar 11y agoIf you step outside during the day you can have first-hand experience of a contained fusion reactor that manages to heat things up at a distance. That's how we'll extract energy from fusion reactors, but with approximately 1 AU less distance.
- Frenchgeek 11y ago( unless things go comically wrong )
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lorenzhs 11y agoNo, that was the first helium plasma in December. Today's event was the first hydrogen plasma.
- maga 11y agoWhat are the results? I've read they were going to keep the plasma stable for half an hour, have they been able to do that?
- obsurveyor 11y agoNo, they want to do this by 2020.
- ajmurmann 11y agoCan you imagine the chancellor our president coming by for a launch event when you run your software for the very first time that you've never run before not even I an integration test after coding on it for years?!
- Phlarp 11y agoI suspect they had a very robust testing regime for both the software and the hardware used in this project. As well as more formal mathematical proofs of the physics to back up their engineering. A better analogy might be for rockets / spaceflight-- where individual systems are rigorously tested independently, but a live launch is the only place that they all come together and have to function as one tightly coupled system.
- engi_nerd 11y ago> A better analogy might be for rockets / spaceflight-- where individual systems are rigorously tested independently, but a live launch is the only place that they all come together and have to function as one tightly coupled system. I understand the point that you are trying to make, but your analogy is a bit poorly chosen. Speaking from my days as a sounding rocket telemetry engineer, we performed lots of tests of the individual systems, as you say. But then we also put everything together and performed several "sequence tests" where the entire vehicle (minus the motor) was assembled and tested as if the countdown were real. All events were triggered as if the vehicle were in flight, and experiment systems were tested to ensure they would power on as expected and provide real data. If we had any deployables, the deployment mechanism would be tested to the maximum extent possible. These sequence tests happened off the rail (in special testing facilities) and on the rail (fully assembled in launch configuration, with a motor). Basically, if you wait until the actual launch to perform integration tests of all of this, you WILL fail. There are too many pieces that need to function in concert to expect them to all work without integration testing.
- the8472 11y agoThere have already been helium plasma tests in the previous months. This is just the first hydrogen plasma firing.
- frik 11y agoOn 10th December 2015 the have done almost the same experiment: https://youtu.be/R_kPM1J-F0Q?t=3m49s https://youtu.be/R_kPM1J-F0Q?t=3m49s
- IanCal 11y agoA bit of googling didn't hit on much, but is there a plan for what happens in the future if this continues to go well? In the same way that ITER would be followed by DEMO then hopefully more commercial reactors.