23 ms·
Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
- foolfoolz 3y agoi’ve been following this project for 10 years. it’s been successful. but how do projects like these move faster? the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity. it’s supposed to be the pre cursor to the producing reactor
- ladams 3y agoStellarators in particular suffer from very long development cycles. It takes years and years of research to develop the algorithms used to optimize the coil geometries, and then the production of the coils and assembly of the vacuum vessel within the coils is much more challenging than for a tokamak. The coils are hard to produce because they have highly irregular shapes, and tight tolerances. Assembling the vacuum vessel is hard because the coils cover much more of the "toroidal-ish" surface area than in a tokamak. The is a lot of interesting work going on in stellarator design optimization now, but it will likely be many years before that research is realized in another actual reactor.
- fizigura 3y agoFor a few billion USD you could build a real power plant of this type. Sounds expensive, but consider how much money nuclear fission did cost initially, and how much money we burn on other stuff, then it's not unthinkable to have somebody rich chip in and make it happen. (Germany just gave $10bn subsidies for a domestic Intel factory.)
- Guvante 3y agoThey managed to handle what a fission reactor outputs every second in this experiment. I don't think that points to a commercial reactor whenever someone spends a few billions.
- fizigura 3y agoThat's how research works. The first fission experiments couldn't power half a small country either. When you listen to the guys from this original article then you'd know that for 10-20bn USD you could likely build a real power plant with this tech within 5 years. It's obviously not without risk, which is why nobody is doing it. But the technical feasibility is there. They also point out that once the first-of-a-kind installation exists, subsequent models will be way cheaper and way better since you'd have learned a lot and streamlined the process. But we choose to use public money for fossil subsidies instead, cause jobs, or something.
- Guvante 3y agoThe US has spent (inflation adjusted) $34 billion on fusion as of the end of 2021. Assuming no real change it would be $35 billion as of the end of 2023. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/ Fusion has been "a decade away" since before the turn of the millennium. To say we should just throw $10-20 billion at a power plant and hope something comes out is not a good idea. We should wait until one of the many multi billion dollar research plants is able to get even 10% of a reasonable to target energy output before even thinking about that. Otherwise we would likely just sign the death of fusion in the public eye. Could you imagine the backlash if a $40 billion dollar project couldn't even produce power after two decades? (Going off how public works costs and timelines have been going is the reason for higher values)
- barbazoo 3y ago> the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity What's the reason for that?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoIt's a research reactor, not a production reactor. Generating useful electricity was never the design goal. The goal was to learn how to build a reactor that could generate useful electricity.
- KyleBerezin 3y agoWe are researching fusion technology. It would take a reactor many times larger to get more energy out of the facility than you put in. The technology still needs to mature before a reactor that size would be financially responsible.
- aeyes 3y agoIn the German Alternativlos podcast the Wendelstein team (Prof. Dr. Thomas Klinger, Dr. Adrian von Stechow) recently stated that it is already feasible, they estimate a cost of ~€20B and a 5 year construction time for a commercial fusion power plant if we started now. https://alternativlos.org/51/ https://alternativlos.org/51/
- KyleBerezin 3y agoYea, but compare the financial burden of that compared to a solar farm of the same output. Not to mention the technical risk.
- fizigura 3y agoSolar farms on farmland? That won't scale to the energy needs of 8bn+ people if we still want to keep feeding them. Especially a non-vegetarian diet.
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- Eji1700 3y agoMostly, they don't? There should be more funding in this area, but at some point you've got to build it, and that takes a ton of time. Regulations/bureaucracy could be better but at the end of the day you're not going to cut off a ton of time safely. Once you have a working model iteration gets much much faster, but we've simply been hitting walls for decades.
- hedora 3y agoIs there a minimum viable size for a fusion reactor? If it scaled down ennough, they could just launch prototypes into space, and see if they explode.
- Eji1700 3y agoI'm honestly not sure if you're joking but in case you're not, the "minimum viable size" is hardly the largest issue with what you're proposing and it sounds like you're not getting what the key issues are. You're talking about taking a technology that's so finicky we've barely gotten it to work after almost 100 years and rocketing it into space? We're no where near good enough at this to get a test that would work after the extreme violence of an escape velocity launch. Further fusion reactors aren't like fission. "exploding" really isn't a problem . Keeping the reaction going in an efficient manner is. IF exploding was a problem, space is probably the worst place for it? Putting it way underground would be vastly easier and a hell of a lot safer because you won't have material possible falling back to earth/hitting satellites in orbit.
- sdwr 3y agoThat was not a real question, it was a subconscious plea for elon musk to take over and make it work. "Shooting it into space" is a reference to how SpaceX disrupted the rocket industry through a "fail fast" mentality, aggressive goals, and sheer force of will.
- Eji1700 3y agoThis take is even more baffling to me than the original question.
- willis936 3y agoHSX beat them to the punch by over a decade. Small is easy. Unfortunately no machine worth making (power generator relevant) is small. Practice helps.
- atoav 3y agoIn the (German) podcast alternativlos two nerds interview the Wendelstein 7-X people and ask them specifically what stops them from moving faster and their answer was: money.
- KyleBerezin 3y agoAhh, Wendelstein is that stellerator reactor. The stellerator is really cool, and an alternative to a tokamak reactor. Tokamak is the doughnut shaped reactor, and it has a problem where the plasma near the outer circumference has less magnetic confinement. The stellerator is similar, but confines the plasma to a ribbon and folds it over on itself in a mobius-like arrangement. I used to be really interested in this, but forgot it existed over the years. Glad to see it works! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
- white_dragon88 3y agoYou know enough to say more. Say more!
- gabereiser 3y agoSeconded. This is fascinating stuff and reminds me of some crazy rant some guy was telling me about anti-gravity and how electromagnetic “ribbons” could propel you. Obviously the guy was nuts, right? How would one go about learning more about electromagnetic plasma containment folding?
- KyleBerezin 3y agoHaha, no I am just some random guy who reads too many Wikipedia articles. "Electromagnetic plasma containment folding" does sound like something a crazy person at a bus station would rant about. My explanation was definitely over simplified, but I'm not knowledgable enough to go into detail on the topic. I can't even point you towards something to read on the topic since everything I read about it is like 15 years old at this point.
- tootie 3y agoIf a Hollywood screenwriter were naming a crazy science device, they would come up with something like Wendelstien 7-X
- aidenn0 3y agoWhat is "energy turnover" in this usage? [edit] Found it: "Energy turnover is defined as the amount of heat multiplied by the duration of the discharge[1]." By "amount of heat" I assume they mean "heating power delivered to the plasma" b/c the the only way to multiply by time and get Joules is to start with power. 1: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20230227-wendelstein-7-x-energy-turnover/ https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20230227-wendelstein-7-x-en...
- snarkconjecture 3y agoYes, it's a little buried but the article says > The energy turnover results from the coupled heating power multiplied by the duration of the discharge The numbers: > The energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoule was achieved with an average heating power of 2.7 megawatts, whereby the discharge lasted 480 seconds Also: > Within a few years, the plan is to increase the energy turnover at Wendelstein 7-X to 18 gigajoules, with the plasma then being kept stable for half an hour i.e. 10 megawatts for 30 minutes
- magicalhippo 3y agoHow long does it take to restart after losing stability? Ie, would it be feasible in a power plant scenario to settle for 30-60 minutes of stability, and just restart?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amelius 3y agoIsn't this similar to the monetary meaning of the word turnover? Like turnover : profit <==> energy turnover : net energy output?
- runako 3y agoPossibly the poster is from a country like America where "turnover" is not a preferred term to refer to gross receipts of a business. (Americans typically use "revenue" instead.)
- YossarianFrPrez 3y agoIf I understand things correctly, the problem with magnetic confinement (e.g. Tokomaks, Stellarators) is that once you have heated a plasma such that it is "fusing," how do you get the power out with out cooling the very plasma you've just spent a lot of energy heating up? Helion, a fusion startup, claims to have solved this problem via capturing an induced current from colliding two hot plasmas together. I'd be curious if there is any way the Wendelstein can produce electricity.
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoMost fusion power systems assume they are doing that as neutrons. D-T fusion conveniently has the proportion of energy that gets lost from the plasma as KE of neutrons be pretty close to the amount of energy that a conveniently sized fusion reactor can afford to remove from the plasma. Then you trap the neutrons with, for example, a lithium blanket, use them to breed more tritium, and produce energy with a turbine from the heating of the blanket.
- YossarianFrPrez 3y agoAh, got ya. Thanks for the information.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoSpeaking of fusion does anyone know what is going on with SPARC at Commonwealth Fusion Systems? I have been very excited about their system but they are understandably in a deep development and construction cycle after a $2B investment, so all their news page has for the last year are updated business deals and awards. I would love to hear how reactor construction is going.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cmplxconjugate 3y agoMy best friend works for them in diagnostic sub-systems development. The product is still a long way off delivery with many systems being actively designed and refined. Basically it’s busy but will still be quite a while (3-5+ years at least).
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoMakes sense. I would love to see a blog post with some progress pics, but I understand that building a fusion reactor is simply a slow process!
- QuantumG 3y agoI expect they'd happily give access to anyone who wanted to cover it. Say, if someone wanted to do quarterly update videos, and had the appropriate skills, they'd only have to find the right person to ask, on the academic side. Hint.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoThanks. I do have the appropriate skills but I live in California and I’m busy with my own world changing projects that need videos produced about them! I just want to read blog posts about what’s happening.
- fefe23 3y agoFYI: This milestone was in February.
- anonuser123456 3y agoI don’t get it; who cares? We know the equations to burn plasma; that’s the easy part. The hard part is building a machine that can burn plasma and breed tritium at appreciable rates. Why even bother with these machines that can never be built economically?
- constantcrying 3y ago>Why even bother with these machines that can never be built economically? If you can not build a research reactor which functions well, then "building a machine that can burn plasma and breed tritium at appreciable rates." is more than impossible.
- fizigura 3y agoWe know the equations for flight. Why didn't they just build a 787 in the 40s already? Oh, is it because the technology didn't exist and first had to be developed, in incremental refinements? Initial airplanes didn't even fly and half the people trying them died? Oh...
- pfdietz 3y agoThe basic equations of aerodynamics led people (like von Karman) to conclude that lighter than air craft would not be competitive. And so it proved. The basic physics of DT fusion reactors led Lidsky to conclude that any DT reactor would have poor power density. And so it has proved. Sometimes knowledge lets one rule out whole branches of the technology search tree.
- karmajunkie 3y agoThis is perhaps an obvious question to some, but I'll ask it anyway: How is the power generated here converted into usable electricity? I know for conventional fission reactors the heat of fission is basically used to run a steam turbine. Given the extreme heat of the plasma, and that it must be magnetically suspended so that it doesn't even touch the sides of the containment, how is that heat transferred to some other medium to generate electricity?
- Etheryte 3y agoI'm not sure if it's the case for this specific reactor, but the common answer to this question is that you need cooling in the surrounding walls and the coolant that runs through the walls transfers the heat out where it can be used to do useful work.
- peteradio 3y agoYou still get heat transfer from uncharged elements I guess.
- WJW 3y agoGiven that the plasma is several million degrees, it will radiate a lot of energy and heat up the walls even if it does not directly touch them. Just cooling the walls can heat up the cooling fluid enough to later produce steam with. AFAIK the Wendelstein machine is not configured for electricity production though, so the cooling is just cooling atm.
- jeffbee 3y ago> Given that the plasma is several million degrees, it will radiate a lot of energy That doesn't entirely follow. 2 particles whizzing past each other at relativistic speeds have extreme temperatures but don't offer much energy. Mass is in this equation.
- willis936 3y agoWhat if you have 10^20 particles? Each charged particle emits photons with energy/frequency proportional to their speed (Bremsstrahlung). This is mostly from electrons because they are much lighter and so are much hotter/faster. Plasmas are quasineutral though so you'll have those electrons present. There is a long line of research trying to get away from that constraint with little luck so far (but it should continue to be worked on!). Jumpjng back up the stack: photon radiation is mostly considered a loss since it transfers energy out of confinement and does not impart it on other fuel. You nominally extract your heat via neutrons: same as fission reactors. Some designs (Helion) aim for reactions with charged byproducts. The reaction produces a current that can be coupled by a surrounding coil, much like a transformer but powered by current induced by plasma rather than another copper wire.
- expertentipp 3y agoWith gas cut off from pipeline terminated in Greifswald, how will they power now this bottomless energy pit? They still have some money, but a finite amount.
- aquafox 3y agoInteresting fact: Nuclear fusion, even if we'll make it work, won't stop global warming, because the heat it creates heats up the earth enough to bring us outside the Paris agreement: https://twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1605967891928596481 https://twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1605967891928596481
- aquafox 3y agoWhy the down votes? What is factually wrong with that statement?
- coolspot 3y agoDidn’t downvote you, but having unlimited energy source is worth it and can allow us to remove heat from earth. Human-caused CO2 alone contributes 2.1W/sqm while all current human energy production is 0.04W/sqm . Removing extra CO2 alone would offset 50x energy production growth. Then you can do things like placing reflective satellites between earth and sun.
- pfdietz 3y agoBecause the argument involves unlimited future growth in energy use. Compared to the current energy use, fusion (assuming it could be made to work practically) would indeed solve global warming.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoThe burning of 1 kg of coal heats the earth in two ways: A) the energy that is produced immediately (about 24MJ) B) the excess energy absorbed from the Sun over many subsequent years, caused by CO2 emitted burning that coal. The B is much larger than A. The fusion only produces A, but not B.
- constantcrying 3y agoThe threat of the earth heating up by 0.3 degrees due to energy production is irrelevant or at least absolutely worth it as a tradeoff for working fusion. The dangers of climate change is not that the earth heats up by some small amount, the earth can easily cope with that. It is that continued greenhouse gas emissons are causing a ever increasing heatup due to trapped solar energy. (It is also extremely strage that he argues for geothermal in his comments. Does he not realize what that is? Literally heating up the surface of the earth with energy from below.)
- mjfl 3y agoThe Stellarator is theoretically a superior design over the Tokamak, designed to neutralize the JxB force, where J is the current through the plasma and B is the magnetic field guiding the plasma around the device. By twisting the plasma into a shape where the curl of B (proportional to J) is parallel to B, i.e. a helix, the cross product is 0, and thus there are no net magnetohydrodynamic forces on the plasma.
- juujian 3y ago'Theoretically' is the right word for sure. iirc, the predecessor of the Wendelstein led to the bankruptcy of the engineering firms building the parts, because tolerances were so tight and they failed multiple times to land within the constraints.
- mjfl 3y agotrue. but on the other hand, the 'theoretical' is being turned into practice as evidenced by this 8 minute containment. the best a tokamak can do is half a second.
- krasin 3y agoTokamak record time for plasma confinement is 403 seconds as of April 2023, see https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/mutimedia_news/202304/t20230417_329384.shtml https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/mutimedia_news/202304/t20230... 403s is about 7 minutes, so less than Wendelstein 7-X.
- posterboy 3y agoThey could go longer. 7-8 mins is an arbitrary cut off out of fear that something might break (quench), knowing that enough data has been gathered for the time being.
- nielsbot 3y agoW7-X is a new stellarator design. It’s magnet arrangement was optimized using a lot of compute time and is designed to overcome the faults of previous more naive designs.
- Dulat_Akan 3y agoI am thinking why companies making so huge reactors, everything should be simple just for test to get energy
- sp332 3y agoIt's a been a long time, but in a talk at Google, I think Bussard said that power output scales with the 5th power of the radius of the device. There's really no point making a small one.
- pfdietz 3y agoI greet W7-X with a huge yawn. A reactor based on stellarators will still be very large and have very low volumetric power density. The beta is not good, so these would only work with DT, and suffer from the generic problems of all DT schemes.
- moffkalast 3y agoWhat makes tokamaks so much better at power density? After all it's the exact same setup, just shaped differently and without the center coil?
- pfdietz 3y agoI didn't say that. Both tokamaks and stellarators on DT will have lousy volumetric power density. Indeed, any DT scheme will suffer in that respect.
- angiosperm 3y agoRight. It is fun to keep plasma hot for a long time, but literally none of the fusion projects being worked on can ever lead to production of so much as one solitary erg of commercial power. Cost will necessarily be much more than for fission. Fission is far from competitive today, and falling farther behind daily. There is a bare possibility of eventual usefulness for spacecraft propulsion. And, some spinoff might come out of a newfound ability to handle lots of hot plasma. Maybe for sewage treatment?
- stjohnswarts 3y agoCan someone tell me why this won't produce commercial level fusion for 30 years so I can shut down my eternally optimistic "physics kid" portion of my brain for a while?
- bmicraft 3y agoIt will cost too much
- lhoff 3y agoRelated recommendation for the german-speaking crowd here: The Podcast Alternativlos by Felix Von Leitner and Frank Rieger were twice in Greifswald to interview some of the people behind the Wendelstein. In the first episode (http://alternativlos.org/36 http://alternativlos.org/36 from 2016) they mainly focused on the development and build process and the history. The second one is from this year and they talk about the achievements and the future of Fusion (http://alternativlos.org/51/ http://alternativlos.org/51/)
- ChuckMcM 3y agoI love these guys, they are just knocking down the engineering challenges in their plan to completely characterize and control a fusion stream. Sometimes they feel like the Tortoise in the race to a working fusion power plant but they are answering questions (managing wall temps and hold fusion in streams[1]) that the Tokamak folks have yet to solve. My bias though is I'm way more on the "D" side of the R&D spectrum and following ITER often feels like pure "R." [1] https://www.iter.org/of-interest/1188 https://www.iter.org/of-interest/1188
- greesil 3y agoI submitted TFA, which is from February. How come you nerds didn't see this yet?
- gregfjohnson 3y agoQuestion for this knowledgeable group of people: Which fusion start-ups look promising? How does inertial confinement look? Any thoughts on the newly funded start-up Blue Laser Fusion? Any thoughts on one of the older players, TAE? How about Commonwealth? Helion? Others?
- greesil 3y agoZap Energy. They're at least thinking about co-opting existing infrastructure. https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newszap-energy-considers-retrofitting-fusion-reactor-at-coal-plant-10066974 https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newszap-energy-considers-re... Also their concept is just so weird, I love it. Worst case it works in space as a nuclear fusion drive :) My guess is that they're all going to tank without government money, unless by some miracle they have truly found some special low-cost of operation on the first try that beats the current heavily optimized solutions for power generation.
- cyberax 3y agoSorry, but this is bullshit. A steam turbine and a generator will be a _minor_ detail in the overall list of expenses building a fusion generator. It's like saying: "We should build an airport here in the desert, because we'll be able to save on cutting the grass!"
- dumdumchan 3y ago> The energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoule was achieved with an average heating power of 2.7 megawatts, whereby the discharge lasted 480 seconds. Can a physicist/thermal engineer explain what this means?
- danbruc 3y agoThey heated the plasma with a power of 2.7 MW for 480 s which in total deposited 2.7 MW × 480 s = 1296 MJ, i.e. 1.3 GJ, of energy into the plasma heating it up. That is the energy of 310 kg of TNT (4.184 MJ/kg) or burning 38 l of gasoline (34.2 MJ/l). Keep in mind that this energy was deposited into the plasma which has a mass of only about 10 mg.
- airgapstopgap 3y agoThis is an incredible achievement but there are strong reasons to suspect that stellarators are not and will never be plausible candidates for energy generation. For some more experimental or perhaps military tasks, it's viable.
- schainks 3y agoWhy do you think this? Also, suggesting only the military should use it suggests it is stellarators are well suited for energy weapons versus powering homes/industry, which is also curious, as energy weapons need huge impulse amounts of power, not power that is constantly available and ramps slowly by comparison.
- slashdev 3y agoSays you, without mentioning any of the strong reasons.
- nielsbot 3y agoW7-X seems on track to meet their goal of 30 mins sustained plasma. I wish them all the best!
- marsven_422 3y ago[dead]
- Roark66 3y ago>new record for discharge time on Wendelstein 7-X: the hot plasma could be maintained for eight minutes. This is of course a milestone, but note they're currently testing the heating system. It doesn't mean there was any fusion happening.
- rurban 3y agoMajor unit errors, I assume: > In individual areas, temperatures of up to 600 degrees Celsius are reached (red areas). The divertor tiles can withstand temperatures of up to 1200 degrees Celsius. How many 0's are missing there?
- danbruc 3y agoNone. The picture does NOT show the plasma itself, but the temperature distribution at the water-cooled divertor baffles. It's about the temperature of parts of the vessel that get heated by leakage from the contained plasma.