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.
So it’s kind of like a Mercedes-Benz because it works as long as an engineer is close at hand?
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.
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...
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....
Stella!!!
They been trying to get this to work for 30 years. And it still hasn’t reached break even. And even if it did, how much power is it really going to generate? Slightly more than break even? I don’t know why they haven’t built Thorium reactors. In recent years, they’ve regained interest, and India, China and Canada are seriously looking at building them, but the US seems to drag its feet.