Fusion Future in Sight?

[Data Holmes]

http://www.sciencealert.com/china-s...just-smashed-germany-s-hydrogen-plasma-record

Just last week, we reported that Germany’s revolutionary nuclear fusion machine managed to heat hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees Celsius, and sustain a cloud of hydrogen plasma for a quarter of a second. This was a huge milestone in the decades-long pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion, because if we can produce and hold onto hydrogen plasma for a certain period, we can harness the clean, practically limitless energy that fuels our Sun.

Now physicists in China have announced that their own nuclear fusion machine, called the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has produced hydrogen plasma at 49.999 million degrees Celsius, and held onto it for an impressive 102 seconds.

The race is on between German and Chinese camps to push it, but it really looks like fusion power may be closer to reality.

 

[{ Emilia }]

I think the interesting part is that Wendelstein 7-X is a stellerator whereas most other current projects like ITER use the Tokamak design. Designing perfect stellerators used to be pretty difficult because of the computing power needed, from what I understand.

An interesting difference is that, by design, Tokamak can only work in pulses whereas stellerators can run continuously. Which would ease the stress on the device.

Designing and building the coil system for the magnetic field is a real challenge. It's not axisymmetric so it needs a mix of toroid and helical design.

 

[sojourner]

Yep, cheap fusion power is only 20 years away now!

 

[Ronald Held]

When I was a boy, commercial fusion power was 10 years away. ,No closer after a half century

 

[Santaman]

While interesting as usual, I would be a lot happier when they would speed up researching Thorium cycle fission...

 

[Ronald Held]

Is anyone doing that anymore?

 

[Santaman]

I hope so, if not it would be a darn shame.

 

[Mudd]

Yep, cheap fusion power is only 20 years away now!

 

[Count Zero]

I remember when I visited the Max Planck Institut for plasma physics in Garching many years ago there was a model of the Wendelstein. At the time they were just starting building it. Looks like that took a long time.

It would be awesome if this really brought us nearer to fusion reactors producing energy instead of just consuming it. They had a giant generator in Garching for their Tokamak reactor which would continuously draw electricity from the grid and store it for the regular shots to heat the plasma and start the fusion process. They told us that if they took that energy directly from the electrical grid when they needed it the lights in Munich would dim. It was all very impressive.

But later I had a disillusioned ex-employee tell me that he believed it would never work. At the time, there was an article claiming it was impossible to recreate nuclear fusion on earth. So, I remain skeptical. I do appreciate the great length basic research is going to for those sort of things, though. I mean, superconducting magnets cooled down to -200 ° Celsius - that's pretty mindblowing if you think about it.

 

[SPCTRE]

Designing and building the coil system for the magnetic field is a real challenge. It's not axisymmetric so it needs a mix of toroid and helical design.