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posted by cmn32480 on Friday December 11 2015, @03:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the we'll-have-fusion-in-10-years-maybe dept.

The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) is reporting a successful startup of the experimental Wendelstein 7-X fusion device.

On 10th December, the day had arrived: the operating team in the control room started up the magnetic field and initiated the computer-operated experiment control system. It fed around one milligram of helium gas into the evacuated plasma vessel, switched on the microwave heating for a short 1,3 megawatt pulse – and the first plasma could be observed by the installed cameras and measuring devices.

"We're starting with a plasma produced from the noble gas helium. We're not changing over to the actual investigation object, a hydrogen plasma, until next year," explains project leader Professor Thomas Klinger: "This is because it's easier to achieve the plasma state with helium. In addition, we can clean the surface of the plasma vessel with helium plasmas."

The objective of fusion research is to develop a power source that is friendly to the climate and, similarly to the sun, harvests energy from the fusion of atomic nuclei.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Friday December 11 2015, @05:38PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday December 11 2015, @05:38PM (#275053)

    Why? They fired a short 1.3MW microwave pulse into the gas to create a plasma. Last time I checked microwave generators are fairly mature technology and not terribly inefficient, so I would expect the input energy to be not terribly higher than that.

    Note that they're not talking about generating 1.3MW of fusion power - at this point they're not generating any power at all, presumably just testing their ability to generate and contain plasma (at 0.1s of plasma duration they're probably not even testing containment much - just checking for gaping huge holes.). Think of it like flipping on your freshly-built computer to make sure all the components are working. You're not planning to do anything with it just yet, you just want to make sure all the conections have been made properly. It's not until next year that they'll switch over to hydrogen and attempt to generate fusion. And while I'm not terribly familiar with this project, with a $1b Euro price tag I would suspect that this generator is scaled to produce excess power, even if it's not suitable as a commercial reactor.

    Overview for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X [wikipedia.org]

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