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posted by
cmn32480
on Monday November 02 2015, @09:26PM
from the fusion-is-still-only-10-years-away dept.
from the fusion-is-still-only-10-years-away dept.
From Yahoo Finance:
Germany is about to start up a monster machine that could revolutionize the way we use energy.
For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion.And they're still dreaming.
But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change.
Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute completed the world's largest nuclear-fusion machine of its kind, called a stellarator.
The machine, which has a diameter of 52 feet, is called the W7-X.
[...]
Check out this awesome time-lapse video of the construction of W7-X on Youtube.
Additional information can be found at this referenced article from Science .
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 1) by modest on Monday November 02 2015, @09:57PM
I read that the goal is to extend the period of time a reactor can sustain plasma. I don't physics (at this level), but wouldn't sustaining the plasma for a longer period of time would mean a positive reactor could be created with this design?
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Monday November 02 2015, @10:04PM
Yes and no. It certainly could be a contributing factor to that because the warm-up and cool-down periods on reactors eat a lot of power. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the design will yield any sort of meaningful productive capacity. The technical limits of extracting the produced energy alone could prove excessively problematic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @12:51AM
Fusion research is fundamentally flawed and always will be. Until we can compress space like the tremendous gravitational fields inside stars, fusion is doomed to fail. You simply cannot hope to replace gravity with magnets and think you'll get the same result. Gravity takes no energy to sustain. Magnetic fields take energy to create. The net energy result will ALWAYS be negative. But hey, what's another few billion spent on a dead end between friends.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Tuesday November 03 2015, @01:38AM
huh! shows what you know: i got some of them neodime, or sumpin magnets, and they is not only *strong*, jack, they is PERMANENT ! ! !
get you a metal sphere, smack them magnets all around, and, viola, as the frogs say, containment for about $25 of magnets off aliexpress...
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Tuesday November 03 2015, @01:54AM
Gravity takes no energy to sustain
Consider that matter is energy...
Magnetic fields take energy to create.
Explain why the bar magnet on my refrigerator requires to batteries to generate a field. Then you will be enlightened.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:05AM
To make your bar magnet, somebody had to heat a bit of metal, in which the magnetic domains were randomly aligned, above its Curie point in the presence of a magnetic field, then cool it. I would assume that aligning the domains reduces the entropy within the metal, thereby increasing the entropy elsewhere.
Now, sustaining the magnetic field is a different matter.