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Wendelstein 7-X sets new fusion record
- s1artibartfast 1y agoArchive and alternate source: https://archive.is/OHy4l https://archive.is/OHy4l https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.html https://phys.org/news/2025-06-wendelstein-nuclear-fusion.htm...
- _Microft 1y agoHere's the statement on the official website if you prefer that: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/5532945/w7x https://www.ipp.mpg.de/5532945/w7x
- jablongo 1y agoIt seems like the ranking of likely success in the next 10 years is 1. Commonwealth (tokamak w/ high temp superconducting magnets) 2. Helion (field reversed configuration, magnetic-inertial, pulsed) .... ?. Wendelstein (stellarator) Maybe stellarators will be the common design in 2060 once fabrication tech has improved, but for the near future I think its going to be one of the first two.
- niemandhier 1y agoProxima Fusion builds a stellator. As far as I remember they were founded by wendelsteinians. They are the only fusion startup I know of that was faster than their own timeline in the last year.
- dralley 1y agoIt'll be really funny if we get a commercial fusion device before ITER has even been turned on. I'm sure they developed some really useful technology in the process of building the thing, but I suspect they would have made more progress faster if they had taken a more iterative approach.
- prpl 1y agothis discounts the likelihood that other breakthroughs are correlated with ITER in some way. The first transistor in Silicon Valley wasn’t made by Shockley.
- tobylane 1y agoHow isolated are the paths it could have taken? One major outdated choice ITER took is cold magnets, rather than "warm". Could they have switched this point in an iterative project?
- GloamingNiblets 1y agoGood list, I'm also keeping an eye on Tri Alpha Energy and First Light Fusion. TAE recently announced [1] initiating a field reversed configuration with no plasma injectors, only neutral beam injection, which is a pretty big deal in simplifying the design. [1] https://tae.com/tae-technologies-delivers-fusion-breakthrough-that-dramatically-reduces-cost-of-a-future-power-plant/ https://tae.com/tae-technologies-delivers-fusion-breakthroug...
- actinium226 1y agoThea Energy is working on a stellarator that doesn't require the complex shaping coils that W-7X is using. I'd put them above Helion and below CFS, but in a couple years they might take the top spot.
- drewvolpe 1y ago4. Acceleron (muon catalyzed) There's huge advantages to muon catalyzed if they can get it to work. Plants would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper to build. [0] https://www.acceleron.energy/ https://www.acceleron.energy/
- fpoling 1y agoI doubt Helion will work. By their own paper using simplified model their device allows theoretically for Q no more than 2 (2 times energy produced versus energy spent). They claim with their like 90% efficient capture they still get net energy gain. But typically reality way messier than model and I will be surprised if they archive Q=1. Tokamaks main problem is plasma instabilities. While Commonwealth may archive high Q briefly, nobody knows how plasma will behave at those conditions and long operations may not be possible. Stellarators on the other hand do not have plasma stability problems. So my bet is on those.
- audunw 1y agoIf the goal is viable commercial operation, Helion has vast benefits over the other approaches when it comes to the economics of turning the fusion energy into electricity. All approaches have huge hurdles to overcome. Helion may have bigger challenges on the Q side, but all-in-all I think the probabilities of being viable ends up similar. All other fusion power plants are thermal power plants. I suspect all thermal power plants will end up being economically unviable in the world of renewables, for various reasons. They’re just too bulky and slow, and require special consideration wrt cooling. It’s one of the reasons why gas power is king these days. If we think really far ahead, the scaling of thermal power plants is limited by the heat they put out. It ends up contributing to global warming just from the thermal forcing they apply to the environment. The effect of the ones we have today are already surprisingly significant. Helion is a path to being able to produce a huge amount of energy with fairly limited impact on the environment (eventually limited by the thermal energy they dump, but perhaps they can use thermal radiation panels that dump the waste heat energy directly to space)
- pfdietz 1y agoThey've already demonstrated very high efficiency recovery of the plasma energy that they inject when the plasma is compressed. The additional plasma energy from fusion products would be recovered just the same way.
- Izikiel43 1y agowhat about general fusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion
- Robotbeat 1y agoSince the article opening sentence and headline don’t say it: The breakthrough is the plasma “triple product,” literally just the plasma temperature (in keV) times particle density times (confinement) time. The Lawson Criterion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion A useful fusion power plant needs a triple product of at least about 3e12 keV * s * m^-3. They weren’t fusing things (at least, not much). This is a figure of merit that allows you to compare, across all the different fusion methods, how well you would be able to fuse the plasma if you were using burnable fuel such as deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen that have one or two extra neutrons).
- IshKebab 1y agoSo on this graph they're at about 0.2e20, but it also says they need 3e21 (and the graph on Wikipedia agrees)... So are they 150x off the target? 3e12 is a typo I guess?
- willis936 1y agoYeah it's 3E21 in SI units. The wikipedia graphs also highlight how nonlinear performance scales across machines. W7-X isn't 1000x larger than T3, yet performs ~1000x better. Confinement field strength (a little expensive) and major radius (very expensive) are knobs that turn these from research machines into power plants.
- ipnon 1y agoI have a feeling ASI will follow similar trajectory as fusion, with the critical intelligence explosion always 2 years away. AGI by Turing’s definition is here. But fusion my whole life has been just around the corner…
- ahoka 1y agoIf we ever have access to unlimited cheap energy, then we are going to boil the world.
- K0balt 1y agoSo it would seem, but we could also air condition the world and beam the energy into deep space instead.
- WillAdams 1y agoWhy beam it anywhere? Why not capture and make use of it? Isn't that the whole point of heat pumps? Grab energy from one locale, move it another to do useful work?
- ithkuil 1y agoYou need a temperature differential.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago“Energy” is a colloquially ambiguous term. The better terms are available energy (exergy) and entropy. The Earth radiates away almost exactly as much energy as it receives. It has to. Otherwise it would boil. Our biosphere, however, extracts a lot of available energy from that system. That results in the Sun shining low-entropy energy on the Earth, and the Earth radiating high-entropy radiation away. Put another way, a universe that is homogenous at 10 million degrees has plenty of energy. But it has zero useful energy because you have no entropy gradient.
- grues-dinner 1y ago
- ninetyninenine 1y agoI have a question. How come the mathematical modeling and simulations haven't yet yielded us the perfect design that will get things right? How come we have to build it and test it to know if it works? Do we lack a mathematical model?
- burnt-resistor 1y agoPutting a bunch of much more viscous radioactive material within proximity of each other is simpler than squishing and maintaining confinement of plasma under extreme conditions. Fission reactors are relatively "easier" to simulate as giant finite element analysis Monte Carlo simulations with roughly voxels of space, i.e., thermal conductivity, heat capacity, etc. I happened to have been involved with one that was 50+ years old that worked just fine because of all of physicists and engineers who carefully crafted model data and code to reflect what would be likely to happen in reality when testing new, conventional reactor designs. The problems with fusion are many orders-of-magnitude more involved and complex with wear, losses, and "fickleness" compared to fission. Thus, experimental physics meeting engineering and manufacturing in new domains is expensive and hard work. Maybe in 200 years there will be a open source, 3D-printable fusion reactor. :D
- KingOfCoders 1y agoThe difficulty is in the details. Small differences lead to bigger differences, like in chaos theory [0] What if the model says this coil needs to be 23.1212722 centimeter? Or two coils need to be 37.1441129 centimeters apart? How do you build that? Mathematics is always much more precise than engineering. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Norton_Lorenz#Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Norton_Lorenz#Chaos_the...
- HPsquared 1y agoYou need to think of what happens if it's 0.001 cm too big, small, etc. Manufacturing always involves errors and engineering requires tolerances.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
- ChuckMcM 1y agoI love these guys and gals. Just knocking down the engineering goals one after another. It's been a lot of fun watching their progress over the years. If they told me "we're going to build a energy producing stellarator in 5 years" I'd actually believe them. :-).
- lukan 1y agoGive them the funding and they would love to start .. But there is a german fusion startup about to build a stellarator. https://www.proximafusion.com/about https://www.proximafusion.com/about (I assumed there was some sort of cooperation with Wendelstein, but found no mentioning of such on a quick look now)
- PeterUstinox 1y agoThey do cooperate and Jorrit Lion, co-founder of Proxima Fusion, was studying in Greifswald for Wendelstein 7-X, also see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379625000705 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092037962...
- lukan 1y agoBut they somehow avoid making a visible cooperation reference on the main page, like they do for other research institutions like Jülich. (Or I missed it.) But sure, they definitely reference it in the text, also on the main page. Maybe there are complicated legal reasons for it.
- mrbluecoat 1y agoKudos to the science but also the artistic beauty of that view inside the vacuum vessel. I can't even fathom the engineering that produced that structure.
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- Synaesthesia 1y agoI'm a bit of a fusion contrarian. I think it's cool and all, but I don't think we're going to get it working. Instead, we should be focusing on building nuclear (fission) plants, and of course expanding use of Solar and wind. China is doing it, they're now world leaders in nuclear power, along with Russia.
- dustbunny 1y agoI think this is the dominant viewpoint of everything thinking about nuclear. But using "instead" implies zero sum thinking. Halting research in fusion does not cause investment in fission. They are only slightly related things.
- rickydroll 1y agoI'm basically in the same camp as you. However, nuclear plants take over 10 years to build. Battery capacity has increased dramatically over the past few years. Current projections indicate that 2025 will see more batteries brought online than there were in total in 2023. With that rate of growth for batteries and the current improvements in battery capacity, will there be any need for a fusion plant, given that we won't see one come online for at least 10 to 15 years?
- lukan 1y agoChina is also investing in Fusion https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-nuclear-fusion-reactor https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-nuclear-fusion-reactor In general, I was leaning towards your side, but after learning a bit more about Wendelstein via a german podcast who went there twice https://alternativlos.org/36/ https://alternativlos.org/36/ I believe the time for fusion is indeed near. For the current energy needs, I still would rather invest heavily in solar, wind and battery, though. But recent breakthroughs in superconductors and advancement of computers (confinement of the plasma needs lots of fast calculations) make it seem like a realistic goal to pursure for mid and long term.