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Wendelstein 7-X achieves world record
- ckastner 8y agoThis is fantastic news! Based on this information, I conclude that nuclear fusion is probably only about 20 years away.
- daef 8y agoThe question is if we'll live long enough to experience the time after those magical 20 years....
- mabbo 8y ago> probably only about 20 years away Down from the '25 years away' it has been for the last 50. I'm not being facetious, I actually think that's huge win and we should all be happy.
- gmueckl 8y agoI've been following fusion research on and off since I've been a little kid. It's always been far in the future. Back then it seemed like I could actually see a fusion reactor when I'm an old man. Now, 25 years later, the rate of progress generally feels like the date has shifted to "not in my lifetime". It's kind of a weird feeling. Edit: Addendum: I vividly remember images with visualization results for numerical simulations on the reactor vessel shape for Wendelstein 7-X. That was back in 1992 or so. This just shows how long this experiment was in the making.
- juliangoldsmith 8y agoAnd only another 20 after that, of course. We should have strong AI by that time as well.
- jandrese 8y agoIt will be the perfect power plant for my flying car.
- emeraldd 8y agoThe obligatory XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/678/ https://m.xkcd.com/678/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- adrianN 8y agoCan we stop with the "fusion will always be x years away" meme? Fusion is mostly a number of invested dollars away. A big reason why we don't have fusion reactors yet is because nobody invests sufficient amounts into the necessary research. Check this graph http://imgur.com/sjH5r http://imgur.com/sjH5r from the old Slashdot interview https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions?sdsrc=rel https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus... It's just disrespectful to all the brilliant physicists and engineers who work on the topic to belittle their efforts like that.
- jgh 8y ago> You might say that we’re not a certain number of years away from a working fusion power plant, but rather about $80-billion away (in worldwide funding). That's a surprisingly small number for the impact nuclear fusion could make. I wonder why we haven't seen any billionaires taking up the challenge, even though this might be more impactful than space tourism or people on mars.
- skybrian 8y agoFor context, that's over twice the size of the Gates Foundation. You have to compare that to all other possible investments, including energy startups that could pay off a lot sooner. Note that SpaceX is set up as a business, not a charity; Musk may talk a lot about Mars but that's not really where the money goes.
- inteleng 8y agoThe money funding SpaceX could hardly be allocated towards sustainable colonization of Mars in a more efficient manner. If you can think of one, please email Elon.
- skybrian 8y agoSure, SpaceX has good business plan. That's the point. Building rockets only for a future Mars voyage and not making any money along the way would be a bad way to do it. By contrast, fusion will only be a scientific research project for many years and many billions.
- zerostar07 8y ago> 20 years On which reference frame?
- Pica_soO 8y agoIf you could integrate fusion into a human being- that would allow for time travel.
- lazysheepherd 8y ago"You Can Always Get What You Want — But Not What You Need" > https://youtu.be/QCw_D7dr7Rw https://youtu.be/QCw_D7dr7Rw If you spare half an hour to Google, you can find out what we want collectively; 1) Find global spending on fusion research and note it down. 2) Pick some other stuff to compare it to. Like global annual military budget. Annual profits of the largest companies and what they sell to make it. Or how much do we spend on 'entertainment'. Or popularity of Kardashians(given even I know that f#cking name...) or whatever. You'll be quick to realize that the fusion is sitting in the corner, waiting for us to "want to have it". It makes me feel depressed to see on every fusion article in 2018, there is a paragraph allocated to explain how fusion is different from fission and how it is not... basically not a bomb. The topic feels home in HN, but I do not know if you ever brought up fusion in a talk with family or even among your young friend circle. I certainly have engaged in that experiment myself. People do not even know what the heck is fusion, let alone lobbying to fund it with tax money. In this state, I say, the advancement on fusion is rather stellar, I congratulate wholeheartedly anyone putting sweat and money in it to bring things to this level.
- pfdietz 8y agoFusion isn't marginal because funding is low. Rather, funding for fusion is low because fusion is marginal. The money would be there if the technology warranted it. But examined closely, fusion doesn't appear promising, so people close their checkbooks.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIf you speak German the podcast Alternativlos has a fantastic episode about Wendelstein. Highly recommended.
- sschueller 8y agoDid you mean this one https://alternativlos.org/36/ https://alternativlos.org/36/ ?
- carbocation 8y agoI also think that if you click on the flag at the top right to get the German translation, then let Chrome translate this to English, it reads a bit better.
- phkahler 8y agoSo where are they along the project plan to useful fusion energy? Since that is not the end goal of this project, how far along the project plan for this device are they? I'm really well past the phase of being excited about milestones like "record for a stellarator". Put it in context, show where we are on the plan. Perhaps it's behind, but still moving forward - that's fine. Confirming things work as predicted is awesome and tells me they should be moving forward at a good pace right? So where are they on that gantt chart?
- maxxxxx 8y agoThey are still far away from a useful reactor. There are a lot of fundamental questions to be resolved.
- Semirhage 8y agoNowhere close, but as you rightly stated, that isn’t the goal of this experimental device. For what it is, which is an exploration of the dynamics of containing high temperature plasmas, it is a resounding success. What you’re asking is sort of like someone asking Babbage how close he is to a Pentium 90. Babbage still did some incredible and foundational things, and it was still a world away from playing Doom. There are a lot of issues outstanding for fusion to be a viable power source, and this reactor is simply exploring the dynamics of one of those issues. Putting aside hype and desperation, there is no chart yet. For a fusion plant to work and compete with any other plant, you need it to have good uptime, relatively low maintenance burdens in terms of downtime and costs, good output, a viable source of fuel, a fusion cycle that is safe and sustainable, and more. As of today the d-t cycle isn’t sustainable because it requires tritium, produces a lot of energetic neutrons that along with helium will undermine the reactor. The problem is that more viable fusion cycles occur at significantly higher temperatures and it’s a struggle to control plasma at d-t temps. The lack of control both quenches the reaction, and exposes parts of the reactor to plasma which erodes the material. Neutron bombardment causes the metal to become brittle, and helium infiltrates and undermines it too. So a reactor would be down for maintenance a lot, which would make it difficult to work as an economically viable source of power. As of today the tritium for the reaction has to be bred in fission reactors. There are theoretical plans to use a “blanket” impregnated with an isotope of Lithium to breed tritium within the fusion reactor, but so far no one has gotten it to sustainably work near necessary levels. As a result a fusion reactor today would require fission reactors, and it might make sense to ask why we don’t just stick to the far more mature and efficient fission technology. There are lots of other issues that aren’t as big or obvious as what I’ve described, but ITER and desperation hype aside, there are more unsolved problems than solved. So where this reactor is concerned, be excited for what it is away from the context of “fusion any day now!” hype. Appreciate the slow, but steady progress in the context of incremental research. If you want clean power in your lifetime, support fission plants.
- blattimwind 8y agoJust to reiterate, Wendelstein 7-X is not about fusion. 7-X is a research project about controlling a plasma. It is not meant to evaluate whether energy production is viable, neither is it setup to do so.
- alexgmcm 8y agoTo be fair though - the stellarator design is pretty cool as it doesn't have a plasma current and nowadays we can heat the plasma via beam injection. The lack of the current might make it more stable vs. the tokamak.
- mrfusion 8y agoWhat do you mean by current?
- gnode 8y agoElectric current; net momentum difference between positive and negative charges within the plasma. I.e. nuclei moving clockwise, and electrons counter-clockwise within the tokamak, or vice-versa. The plasma may have a high temperature (and thus induce fusion) without such current.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI think that undersells it. While it is true that the 7-x is about proving the concepts of the Stellerator, you can use the plasma stream from such a device as part of an energy system.
- IshKebab 8y agoIt's clearly about fusion. Maybe you meant it's not about generating power?
- blattimwind 8y agoNo. 7-X hasn't performed any fusion at all and while they later want to use plasmas that are closer in composition to what you'd find in a fusion reactor, very little fusion will take place — intentionally, to avoid generating significant amounts of neutron radiation. It's perhaps important to point out that fusion is not difficult; it's very easy in fact. The hard part for power generation is plasma physics, i.e. being able to contain and control a plasma effectively. That's what 7-X is designed to research. If you can control a sustained plasma, fusion power is relatively easy.
- rurban 8y agoGeneral comparison of the two competing systems: Tokamak vs Stellerator https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468080X16300322 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468080X1... Looks like theoretically the Stellerator is superior in practice, while in practice only the Tokamak is being worked on practically.
- skgoa 8y ago> while in practice only the Tokamak is being worked on practically. Other than the very experiment the OP is about.
- rurban 8y agoNot really. Wendelstein is not for practical usage of fusion. It's only there to make a point that the Tokomak design is inferior, and all the money should have went to the germans instead. But thanksfully both teams are working together. We will see if something better will come out of it. Even if I'm extremely sceptical on both.
- nabla9 8y agoFortunately the ITER project does wast amount of R&D and basic engineering that solves problems common to both design. If the problems in stellators are solved and it proves to be superior to tokamak in practice there is no need to start from scratch.
- ygra 8y agoThere's also quite a bit of talk going on between scientists on both projects. If I remember correctly, the microwave heating design of Wendelstein 7-X also solved a few problems for ITER and in general it's more of a friendly competition.
- azernik 8y agoI view it as less of a competition than as projects working on different parts of the same problem - ITER seems to be working more on the problems of managing a fusion reaction (materials, procedures, shielding, etc.), while using a better-studied containment design with lower technical risk. Meanwhile, Wendelstein is ignoring all those other challenges in order to study an alternate containment design in isolation.
- saganus 8y agoWhat does "At an ion temperature of about 40 million degrees" mean? How does "ion temperature" relate to "regular" temperature? Is it similar to how we can cool down things to fractions above absolute zero, by using lasers to reduce the movement of atoms? i.e. is the "ion temperature" a measure of how fast are they moving, as opposed to the every-day meaning of temperature as "how hot something is"? I realize that "how hot something is" depends on how fast the atoms of said "something" are moving, but since they specify "ion temperature" I'm guessing it has a very specific meaning. I searched for "ion temperature" but only found about Electron temperature [0]. Could someone explain it to me in lay terms? :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_temperature
- Certhas 8y agoIn a plasma electrons and ions can have very different temperatures: "[...] the ion temperature may be very different from (usually lower than) the electron temperature" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)#Temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)#Temperature
- saganus 8y agoOh, that's interesting. From that Wikipedia article: "For this reason, the ion temperature may be very different from (usually lower than) the electron temperature." So if the ion temperature of the plasma in the Wendelstein 7-X is about 40 million degrees...the electron temperature could be even higher? What does it even mean to have a temperature of 40 million degrees? AFAIU, the Sun has temperatures much lower than that. That's utterly mind blowing...
- wolf550e 8y agoThe core of the sun is 15 million Kelvin [1]. The surface temperature of the sun is approximately 5,778 K (5,505 °C, 9,941 °F) [2]. I can guess what the insane pressure means ("estimated at 265 billion bar (3.84 trillion psi or 26.5 petapascals (PPa))"), but I don't know what millions Kelvin means. It should be kinetic energy. So maybe it means the ions vibrate very fast? 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Sunlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Sunlight
- epistasis 8y ago> The objective of fusion research is to develop a power plant favourable to climate and environment. Like the sun, it is to derive energy from fusion of atomic nuclei While plasma containment seems like an essential step towards fusion-based energy, is fusion-based energy a desirable goal? Right now, fission-based nuclear energy is only used as a heat source for steam-driven turbines. It's a fantastically complex and expensive way to make heat. Is fusion energy on Earth going to do something similar? And if so, is this source of heat actually going to be cheaper than using the sun as a distant fusion reactor? (Which is what drives both solar and wind energy on Earth.) It seems quite doubtful that fusion could ever be cheaper than solar or wind energy, the tech-to-energy ratio just seems massive in comparison. So if it's not Earth where fusion energy will be useful, how about in space? Here on Earth, the Carnot cycle is used to convert heat into useful mechanical energy, then finally electrical energy, which is usually the true goal. But the Carnot cycle requires dissipating massive amounts of heat; just as much energy is dissipated as heat as gets turned into electricity. And heat dissipation isn't such an easy thing in space, is it? I feel like I'm missing some rather large puzzle pieces here. Without them, fusion does not really seem like an engineering goal towards a good energy source, just engineering research into better containment of difficult materials. Could somebody help enlighten me?
- rohit2412 8y agoJust a layman. But wind and solar have big limitations. They are available only in a limited amount only under certain conditions and their variability isn't under our control. And if you think energy storage would solve all this, batteries aren't cheap. We would like to have an infinite source of energy that we can control on demand.
- tzahola 8y agoHow’s Lockheed’s Z-pinch based compact reactor?
- topspin 8y agoLatest news is a patent grant to Lockheed in March. Not much else recently.
- xinyhn 8y agoAnyone interested in the subject matter would probably enjoy Omega Tau Podcast. http://omegataupodcast.net/tag/fusion/ http://omegataupodcast.net/tag/fusion/
- pfdietz 8y agoWhenever you're shown a new gosh-wow fusion design, ask "What is the power density of this design?" The power density of a PWR fission reactor core is 100 MW/m^3. The power density of ITER (gross fusion power/volume inside the cryostat) is maybe 0.05 MW/m^3. There are fundamental engineering limits to fusion that guarantee the power density will suck compared to fission. So my default take on any fusion design is that it will never be competitive with fission, never mind the things that are cheaper than fission.