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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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(Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Monday November 02 2015, @11:02PM
AFAIK this is a different kind of design from a Tokamak.
The ITER Tokamak reactor is supposed to be doing its "near production scale" experiments in the coming decade, and for a more than 10 billion euro pricetag.
It's supposed to break-even and experiment with how the hell you harvest all that energy from the plasma, and what materials get ridiculously radioactive or brittle, and how to make Tritium, etc.
So that the next reactor after that, DEMO, can use the "lessons learned" and be commercially viable (after an debt payoff period of several hundred years, maybe ;-) )