Posted on 12/09/2016 12:12:49 AM PST by Berlin_Freeper
Last year, Germany completed and turned on the Wendelstein 7-X nuclear fusion reactor. This amazing piece of technology uses a complicated design called a stellerator, and scientists have finally managed to verify that the design works like it's supposed to.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
As opposed to all those not so complex simple fusion reactors.
Sort of interesting I guess it works but it is far to complicated to be commercial viable. The Thorium (MSR)reactors are simple and they work. There was one running for 4 years at Oak Ridge in the late 60’s. It was so simple and reliable you could turn it off in the evening or on a Friday and start it up again when you came back to work.
I forgot to add: “...Unfortunately, current fusion reactors, including the W7-X, are still not efficient enough to produce more energy than they use. However, the success of W7-X gives the researchers hope that the next generation of fusion reactors will be able to reach that limit.”
Tying your shoelace is complex until you’ve done it the third time.
So it’s kind of like a Mercedes-Benz because it works as long as an engineer is close at hand?
> As opposed to all those not so complex simple fusion reactors.
I built one in my garage from plans in the back of Popular Mechanics.
My 10 mile high view is that a magnetic containment field has to encircle the atoms fusing...so the magnetic field is covering a larger area than the atoms...and every part of the magnetic field needs to be stronger than the energy released by atoms fusing.
Which is not how I’d expect to get a lot of energy *out* of any stellarator/mag-field fusion reactor.
Could you get fusion from 1? Sure...but what’s that buy you?!
Pretty good chance that entire design philosophy will always require more energy for the magnetic fields than it gets from the atoms inside that field fusing.
...but, I admit that I could be wrong.
Agree. But Thorium is not good for producing fissionable bomb material, if I remember right.
“I built one in my garage from plans in the back of Popular Mechanics.”
I could done the exact some thing had that coffee ring stain from my dad not gotten right on second to last equation.
The problem with the Wendelstein 7-X reactor, is just when you start to get it to work well, it forces you to upgrade to Wendelstein 10-X.
Wendelstein 10-X is OK, except it’s clumsy and shuts down to upgrade just about every night...
If you compare a Polywell reactor to the Tokamak reactor, you would come away with the opinion that the Polywell is a relatively simple fusion reactor.
I saw what you did there... :)
Economical Fusion energy has been on of those things (like a manned spaceflight to Mars) that has been “only 20 years away” for the last 50 years. I would love to see it, but I’m not going to get excited until their building a working Fusion Plant down the road from my house....
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