3 ms·
The last time it was in the news I think naysayers listed the main caveat with stellerators as something along the lines of very low plasma density compared to
by moffkalast 3y ago
The last time it was in the news I think naysayers listed the main caveat with stellerators as something along the lines of very low plasma density compared to tokamaks, which makes them unable to get anywhere close to the energy break even point.
- willis936 3y agoDoesn't really track. Stellarators can operate above the Greenwald density limit. They just have shorter confinement times for a given field strength and major radius. http://fusionwiki.ciemat.es/wiki/Greenwald_limit http://fusionwiki.ciemat.es/wiki/Greenwald_limit
- cyberax 3y agoThe main problem with stellerators is their murderous complexity. You need to manufacture several thousand different parts with complicated 3D geometry, micron-level precision, and from unobtanium-class materials. All while not being able to properly simulate the outcome on a computer. Stellarators are superior to tokamaks, so an energy-positive stellerator will be about 2 times smaller than a tokamak. But we're still talking about a building-sized vacuum chamber. That's why for ITER it makes sense to go with a simpler design to de-risk the main objective: building a burning plasma laboratory.