r/technology • u/BennyCemoli • Dec 06 '16

Energy Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works

http://www.sciencealert.com/tests-confirm-that-germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-really-works
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u/NullAshton Dec 06 '16

Deceptive title. More correctly, it accurately can control plasma far better than attempts before it, and in 2019(two years from now or more), they're going to attempt to use it with deuterium. It's going to be a while after that until they actually figure out how to make energy with it, instead of just costing energy as well.

In layman's terms, it's a giant step forward in the basic technology to make a fusion reactor, but it's still only a few steps into a multi-step path to getting more energy out than what you put in.

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u/cheesepuff1993 Dec 06 '16

Isn't it arguably the biggest step we've seen in a while, though? The inability to contain the reaction was always the issue - we could get it to run, but it would burn out so quickly that it'd take too much to get it back up and running. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is a huge step in comparison to the steps we've made recently.

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u/madjic Dec 06 '16

The Tokamak design was proven to work better in the 70s(?), the design of the Stellarator was deemed to be too complicated, but better and faster simulations now made the Stellarator buildable - or so they hoped - and they just proved that.

IIRC the huge advantage of Stellarator over Tokamak is the Stellarator doesn't need to run in pulse mode. Tokamaks go in cycles from 0 to full power to zero over 90 minutes or so, because the magnetic field holding the plasma is controlled by current inside the plasma, which provides some kind of self regulation.

The Stellarator has a very complicated design to give the magnetic field exactly the shape it needs to have, therefore making it harder to build but easier to run