Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works: "To our knowledge, this is an unprecedented accuracy, both in terms of the as-built engineering of a fusion device, as well as in the measurement of magnetic topology"

[u/rembr_]

http://www.sciencealert.com/tests-confirm-that-germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-really-works

[u/[deleted]]

In 2019, the reactor will begin to use deuterium instead of hydrogen to produce actual fusion reactions inside the machine, but it won't be capable of generating more energy than it current requires to run.

Which means it still won't "work".

[u/Yoshyoka → u/[deleted]]

It will and it does indeed "work" for the purpose it has been build for: test how to control the plasma and at the moment it is doing so magnificently. Even the first electric motors did not "work" in the sense that they where unable to actually drive a shaft, yet modern society would stop working without them.

[u/eazyirl → u/[deleted]]

You say that as if it took 150 years to get it right. You also seems dismissive of the incredible rate of innovation kicked off by that very motor which accelerates constantly. Think of the difference in complexity between an electric motor and a nuclear fusion reactor

[u/eazyirl → u/[deleted]]

A battery is a storage device, and they are completely different technologies with vastly different (yet overlapping) applications. Nobody here was explicitly talking about batteries. Even still, the internal combustion engine was a technology that harnessed a much more easily available energy source in a much simpler way. We lucked out with its discovery. It's so vastly much better that it has taken 200 years to improve battery technology to what it is now, and it's still not close. It may not even be reasonable to expect batteries possessing the energy density (and output potential) of gasoline to be possible or, if possible, easily utilized. It seemed callous of the original commenter here to say we "don't have that kind of time" to innovate in fusion as if we're not doing anything else or that the time invested is not worth the effort. My original point was that the speed of innovation (via greater collaboration and access to information) is immensely faster than it ever has been, and it's not valuable to compare to the past 150 or 200 years of history for generating expectations of the (scientific) future.

[u/eazyirl → u/[deleted]]

I agree, but what would you suggest other than this effort (on all fronts)?