
Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works - chang2301
http://www.sciencealert.com/tests-confirm-that-germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-really-works
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tonyedgecombe
_It 's not something that will happen tomorrow, but it's an incredibly
exciting time for nuclear fusion, with W 7-X officially competing with
France's ITER tokamak reactor - both of which have been able to trap plasma
for long enough for fusion to occur._

ITER hasn't been built yet and although it is located in France it is an
international project. Errors like this make me wonder about the quality of
the whole article.

~~~
lhl
I saw this on Phys.org 2 days prior, but I think it's somewhat of a given that
these science news sites are for all intents and purposes content farms -
their primary utility is for surfacing interesting bits that you can do your
own followup/research on. To their credit, they do link to the original open
access report.

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lhl
I saw this show up a few days ago as well. What's nice is that the original
Nature Communications submissions is open access:
[http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13493](http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13493)

There's a bunch more interesting visualization of what's going on, so worth a
click if you want to see more.

One meta detail that's particularly interesting to me is that this paper was
originally submitted back in March:

    
    
      Received: 22 March 2016
      Accepted: 07 October 2016
      Published online: 30 November 2016
    

So that's about an 6 months before it was accepted and about 8 months before
it was widely disseminated, make me think about the implications.

Also, as a point of reference, the paper was submitted about a month and a
half after the original live stream for "first hydrogen" (OP-1) February 3,
2016 - I believe they ran about a month of test runs, and no doubt started
crunch numbers immediately after the first run.

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jrumbut
Just as a note, "working as intended" does not include actually generating
electricity.

They just verified that the machine generates the magnetic field that the
designers intended.

That's great, worth reading about for sure, but it is not "really works" in
the sense of it's about to power Berlin.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
Well, W7X isn't capable of producing power. Even if it can sustain fusion it's
a research reactor, it doesn't have any generator infrastructure.

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libeclipse
>And it produces no radioactive waste or other byproducts.

Well, not true. It's just that the waste it does produce is relatively
alright, and becomes inert again within a century - as opposed to a few
hundred thousand years.

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evgen
The problem with this claim is that (generally speaking) material with a short
half-life is very "hot" and will kill just about anything around it. Something
that decays to one tenth of a percent of original mass over a century has a
half-life of ten years. You don't want that anywhere around you, and a
containment leak will be ugly.

~~~
MagnumOpus
> material with a short half-life is very "hot" and will kill just about
> anything around it [...] You don't want that anywhere around you, and a
> containment leak will be ugly.

This description fits a huge number of chemical industrial reagents used in
factories worldwide. Being able to seal it in a barrel and render it harmless
by submerging it in a pool for a few decades (which is well inside the
operational lifetime of the reactor) are trivial challenges both compared to
the usual cleanup problems at Superfund sites and compared to the problem of
storing nuclear waste with half lives in the hundreds or thousands of years.

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boyce
In my student days I went to a talk from one of the scientists working on the
Taurus in Oxfordshire (I think he went to the French project soon after) and
they were having major problems finding materials that could withstand the
heat and radiation produced. He described it as a machine that produced tons
of melted and irradiated beryllium.

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Bdiem
Just to clarify: Wendelstein 7-X is a plasma research reactor, never intended
to produce energy.

Enlightening (german) podcast about the topic with some of the researchers:
[https://alternativlos.org/36/](https://alternativlos.org/36/)

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smuss77
When this gets here: see ya later solar panel companies.

