Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works

Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works(sciencealert.com)

71 points by chang2301 9 years ago | 20 comments

It's not something that will happen tomorrow, but it's an incredibly exciting time for nuclear fusion, with W 7-X officially competing with France's ITER tokamak reactor - both of which have been able to trap plasma for long enough for fusion to occur.

ITER hasn't been built yet and although it is located in France it is an international project. Errors like this make me wonder about the quality of the whole article.

lhl 9 years ago | |

I saw this on Phys.org 2 days prior, but I think it's somewhat of a given that these science news sites are for all intents and purposes content farms - their primary utility is for surfacing interesting bits that you can do your own followup/research on. To their credit, they do link to the original open access report.

jelder 9 years ago | |

Also "2D magnetic field" indicates complete bullshit. Can we remove this post?

lhl 9 years ago |

I saw this show up a few days ago as well. What's nice is that the original Nature Communications submissions is open access: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13493

There's a bunch more interesting visualization of what's going on, so worth a click if you want to see more.

One meta detail that's particularly interesting to me is that this paper was originally submitted back in March:

  Received: 22 March 2016
  Accepted: 07 October 2016
  Published online: 30 November 2016

So that's about an 6 months before it was accepted and about 8 months before it was widely disseminated, make me think about the implications.

Also, as a point of reference, the paper was submitted about a month and a half after the original live stream for "first hydrogen" (OP-1) February 3, 2016 - I believe they ran about a month of test runs, and no doubt started crunch numbers immediately after the first run.

jrumbut 9 years ago |

Just as a note, "working as intended" does not include actually generating electricity.

They just verified that the machine generates the magnetic field that the designers intended.

That's great, worth reading about for sure, but it is not "really works" in the sense of it's about to power Berlin.

SAI_Peregrinus 9 years ago | |

Well, W7X isn't capable of producing power. Even if it can sustain fusion it's a research reactor, it doesn't have any generator infrastructure.

libeclipse 9 years ago |

>And it produces no radioactive waste or other byproducts.

Well, not true. It's just that the waste it does produce is relatively alright, and becomes inert again within a century - as opposed to a few hundred thousand years.

evgen 9 years ago | |

The problem with this claim is that (generally speaking) material with a short half-life is very "hot" and will kill just about anything around it. Something that decays to one tenth of a percent of original mass over a century has a half-life of ten years. You don't want that anywhere around you, and a containment leak will be ugly.

MagnumOpus 9 years ago | | |

> material with a short half-life is very "hot" and will kill just about anything around it [...] You don't want that anywhere around you, and a containment leak will be ugly.

This description fits a huge number of chemical industrial reagents used in factories worldwide. Being able to seal it in a barrel and render it harmless by submerging it in a pool for a few decades (which is well inside the operational lifetime of the reactor) are trivial challenges both compared to the usual cleanup problems at Superfund sites and compared to the problem of storing nuclear waste with half lives in the hundreds or thousands of years.

boyce 9 years ago |

In my student days I went to a talk from one of the scientists working on the Taurus in Oxfordshire (I think he went to the French project soon after) and they were having major problems finding materials that could withstand the heat and radiation produced. He described it as a machine that produced tons of melted and irradiated beryllium.

Bdiem 9 years ago |

Just to clarify: Wendelstein 7-X is a plasma research reactor, never intended to produce energy.

Enlightening (german) podcast about the topic with some of the researchers: https://alternativlos.org/36/

smuss77 9 years ago |

When this gets here: see ya later solar panel companies.