Free Republic

Scientists in Germany said Thursday they had reached a milestone in a quest to derive energy from nuclear fusion, billed as a potentially limitless, safe and cheap source. [...] After spending a billion euros and nine years' construction work, physicists working on a German project called the "stellarator" said they had briefly generated a superheated helium plasma inside a vessel -- a key point in the experimental process. [...] The German experiment, using a machine called Wendelstein 7-X, was aimed at seeing whether it was possible to heat helium atoms with a microwave laser and to briefly contain the plasma...

Researchers could be one step closer to producing energy through nuclear fusion with word that a device called the stellarator is set to go online later this year in Germany. The largest contraption its kind, the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device is housed in a branch of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) near Munich. It won’t actually produce energy, the Institute said, but will be used to test the “specially shaped magnet coils which produce a magnetic cage which confines the plasma and keeps it away from the walls of the plasma vessel.”