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Wendelstein-7X is not a fusion machine, it's only a test for the plasma vessel design.

• DennisP 9y ago
  High school kids build fusors in their garages, fuse deuterium, and get neutron counts. Wendelstein certainly will as well. It'd be very silly not to, and if you look at their technical specs, you'll see that the fuel will include deuterium, at over 100M degrees, enough for plenty of fusion reactions. http://www.ipp.mpg.de/16931/einfuehrung http://www.ipp.mpg.de/16931/einfuehrung Their initial tests did not use deuterium, and that gave a lot of people the wrong impression. (For net power at this temperature they would need tritium, which they aren't using. Tritium is expensive and hard to deal with, and most fusion projects don't bother with it.)
  • nomercy400 9y ago
    Question by a noob: I heard they have 4 grams tritium diluted in ~770000 tons of water in Japan. Can't we use/extract that if it is that valuable? Or isn't it that hard to produce?
    • DennisP 9y ago
      I'm not sure but I think it'd be pretty hard to extract four grams of tritium from 770000 tons of water. The main issue with tritium isn't the expense of getting it, but the problems you face in dealing with it. It's hydrogen with two extra neutrons; it's hard to keep it from leaking and it's radioactive.