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posted by cmn32480 on Monday November 02 2015, @09:26PM   Printer-friendly
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: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 03 2015, @09:00PM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Tuesday November 03 2015, @09:00PM (#258132) Homepage
    Don't traditional uranium reactors burn uranium-235 or uranium-238? And thorium reactors produce uranium-233 in their decay chain?
    OK, it's theoretically possible to hop between the u-235 chain and the u-233 one, but fission happens very readily with 233, so thorium does not generally follow the same set of reactions, output, byproducts, and waste materials as u-235. So they aren't essentially the same.
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