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$7m doesn’t seem much for such a challenging project. How close are they to make this a reality?
by santiagobasulto 3y ago
$7m doesn’t seem much for such a challenging project. How close are they to make this a reality?
- sigmoid10 3y agoNot close. This amount of money will get you some theoretical modelling at best, which is still nice because stellarators are infinitely more complex than tokamaks. The real hope here is that they might solve the plasma instability problem of tokamaks, but the full picture isn't out yet. In any case, we're very far from a commercial stellarator.
- mpweiher 3y agoEr, they've solved the instability problem of tokamaks. They've already run it for 8 minutes, target is 30 and there don't seem to be any fundamental hurdles, just stuff to do to get there. https://www.ipp.mpg.de/5322229/01_23?c=5322195 https://www.ipp.mpg.de/5322229/01_23?c=5322195
- sigmoid10 3y agoNo they haven't. The thing is you need to keep it hot enough and confine it long enough to produce a Q factor large enough for an economically practicable application. We are like one or two orders of magnitude away from that. No magnetic confinement scheme has even reached Q>1 so far, so we're a long way from any useful power plant design.
- willis936 3y agoIndeed it's not. It's a similar level that Type One has received for a demonstration turn of a coil.
- otikik 3y agoIt is "peanuts". If that's the kind of investment it would take to make this a reality everyone and their aunt would have one.
- pgeorgi 3y ago(Some in) the Greifswald team seem to estimate that it takes ~€20bn for a commercial deployment based on Wendelstein 7-X (according to a blogger who went there to ask: https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9a9561ab https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9a9561ab)