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.
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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 .
(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.