Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works(sciencealert.com) |
Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works(sciencealert.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Enlightening (german) podcast about the topic with some of the researchers: https://alternativlos.org/36/