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Honest question: Has man-made nuclear fusion ever happened? Or is it theory, happening on the sun?
Honest question: Has man-made nuclear fusion ever happened? Or is it theory, happening on the sun?
My current favorite future fusion reactor project (I'm a layperson) is the Wendelstein 7-X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X Seems like they're meeting all their planned milestones and it's going well! Excited for their next updates... More from their project page: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/w7x "Wendelstein 7-X is the world’s largest fusion device of the stellarator type."
I’m also a layperson and also a fan of the 7-X, almost on purely aesthetic grounds. The plasma shape is a beautiful twisted loop, the magnets resemble a French crueler, and with the shielding and instrumentation it has all the charm of a steampunk time machine
It reminds me of the principle that one shouldn't start a space travel project that is estimated to take more than x years to complete, because by that time, technological progress will have surpassed its speed and capabilities, and would physically overtake it (the 'wait calculation').
My current favorite future fusion reactor project (I'm a layperson) is the Wendelstein 7-X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X Seems like they're meeting all their planned milestones and it's going well! Excited for their next updates... More from their project page: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/w7x "Wendelstein 7-X is the world’s largest fusion device of the stellarator type."
I’m also a layperson and also a fan of the 7-X, almost on purely aesthetic grounds. The plasma shape is a beautiful twisted loop, the magnets resemble a French crueler, and with the shielding and instrumentation it has all the charm of a steampunk time machine
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m also a layperson and also a fan of the 7-X, almost on purely aesthetic grounds. The plasma shape is a beautiful twisted loop, the magnets resemble a French crueler, and with the shielding and instrumentation it has all the charm of a steampunk time machine
As a layperson, this design seems far too complex to be useful for fast iterative research and ultimately, economic replication. It reminds me of the principle that one shouldn't start a space travel project that is estimated to take more than x years to complete, because by that time, technological progress will have surpassed its speed and capabilities, and would physically overtake it (the 'wait calculation').
Having read about tokamaks for thirty years, I'd be curious what specific breakthroughs and innovations have occurred since the 1980s, which lead to the optimism described in the article (which is otherwise frustratingly devoid of detail). It's great there are seven-peer reviewed articles about SPARC, but plasma was not my specialty in physics -- would any specialists care to comment on whether there is anything part…
My layman's understanding is that recently available (~last 5 years) industrial scale processes to produce rebco tape[1] is the specific advance in superconductor tech that's specifically enabling higher tesla magnetic field strengths from significantly smaller and lighter and easier to manage magnets, so you can get a system that's "powerful enough" to run net posititve at a size that's small enough to be built by a…
They were specifically looking at the tapes ability to function in high magnetic environments such as a tokamak type reactor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't agree more. Once you realize that energy is the fundamental unit which powers everything else in the economy, not only from every movement of ourselves to those of our machines as well, you realize the more we advance in our ability to produce more and more energy at cheaper and cheaper costs in increasingly reliable ways, the more we can accelerate, without exception, every other industry.
Make an efficient fusion reactor the size of a truck, and the solar system becomes your backyard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't agree more. Once you realize that energy is the fundamental unit which powers everything else in the economy, not only from every movement of ourselves to those of our machines as well, you realize the more we advance in our ability to produce more and more energy at cheaper and cheaper costs in increasingly reliable ways, the more we can accelerate, without exception, every other industry.
There is ~zero expectation in the scientific community that fusion is going to be cheap at scale. It might eventually be cheaper than fission due to several factors. But, even that’s looking a long way off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 Here's a video lecture from the MIT Professor (Dennis Whyte) who was leading the research group that provided some of the key designs for the SPARC reactor. As the NYT article explains, that research has been spun out into a startup that raised $200M. The key breakthrough is the advancement of REBCO tape superconductors which allow you to (1) generate record breaking magnet…
It seems that if we can't make fusion work for SPARC it won't likely work in ITER either since they're both based on the same understanding of the physics. Am I wrong on that point? Is there some reason to think that ITER will succeed even if SPARC does not?