Wendelstein W7-X Stellarator: Twisted Donut of Nuclear Fusion

They've developed something similar to a tokamak but this heats up gasses to 8 billion degrees and it's a breakthrough for Earthbound nuclear fusion.

It's almost breaking even in terms of energy production vs. energy input and it's being refined further. This thing is weird looking, like a huge twisted donut with layers of magnetic loops surrounding it in order to accelerate particles.

The complicated shape had to be designed using a supercomputer.

user link on www.sciencemag.org

Any time I hear of "tabletop fusion" there's a big dose of skepticism. Seeing how this is from a relatively credible source, I'm willing to accept that they're getting closer to making such a thing viable.

We shall see... we shall see.

Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson were talking about this the other day on "Security Now". 8 billion degrees seems... well, you know that's much hotter than the sun.

The sun has the benefit of its enormous mass to aid in fusion, though. It would make sense that far higher temperatures would be needed for nuclear fusion if you don't have the pressure aspect of it. It's cool that fusion can happen at all on Earth and I hope this becomes viable, although I'm still also rooting for Thorium reactors.

This is excellent news, especially that there's competition now in the development of fusion power. The interesting thing with the Stellarator model is actually something that while theoretically been around for a while, has been neglected/discarded in past decades. Its nice to see that taking another angle at the design with more state-of-the-art technology produces so good results.

I wanted to post this the other day, the Chinese have been building their own fusion reactor (which is, however, based on the Russian tokomak style): user link on www.sciencealert.com

There is also another large Tokamak-style reactor being built, ITER, in southern France, which is a really large international cooperation (including the EU, the U.S., China, India, Japan and Russia) which is thought to become operational in 2019.

So here's hoping that fusion power is not "decades away" (which has been the case for... decades? ), but maybe merely a decade.

On Friday, February 12th, 2016 at 4:08 pm, Doitsujin said:

From the shape of that thing it looks like they took ALL the angles at the design!

Nuclear fusion power has been mere decades away for decades, for sure. I have a feeling that decades away for decades will at least change to years away for years. In other words, the predictions are still too optimistic but the reality of it is improving too.