Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
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Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#2i’ve been following this project for 10 years. it’s been successful. but how do projects like these move faster? the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity. it’s supposed to be the pre cursor to the producing reactor
Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#3Ahh, Wendelstein is that stellerator reactor. The stellerator is really cool, and an alternative to a tokamak reactor. Tokamak is the doughnut shaped reactor, and it has a problem where the plasma near the outer circumference has less magnetic confinement. The stellerator is similar, but confines the plasma to a ribbon and folds it over on itself in a mobius-like arrangement.
I used to be really interested in this, but forgot it existed over the years. Glad to see it works!
Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#4i’ve been following this project for 10 years. it’s been successful. but how do projects like these move faster? the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity. it’s supposed to be the pre cursor to the producing reactor
> the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity
What's the reason for that?
Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#5i’ve been following this project for 10 years. it’s been successful. but how do projects like these move faster? the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity. it’s supposed to be the pre cursor to the producing reactor
> the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity What's the reason for that?
It's a research reactor, not a production reactor. Generating useful electricity was never the design goal. The goal was to learn how to build a reactor that could generate useful electricity.
Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#6i’ve been following this project for 10 years. it’s been successful. but how do projects like these move faster? the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity. it’s supposed to be the pre cursor to the producing reactor
Mostly, they don't?
There should be more funding in this area, but at some point you've got to build it, and that takes a ton of time. Regulations/bureaucracy could be better but at the end of the day you're not going to cut off a ton of time safely.
Once you have a working model iteration gets much much faster, but we've simply been hitting walls for decades.
Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#7i’ve been following this project for 10 years. it’s been successful. but how do projects like these move faster? the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity. it’s supposed to be the pre cursor to the producing reactor
> the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity What's the reason for that?
We are researching fusion technology. It would take a reactor many times larger to get more energy out of the facility than you put in. The technology still needs to mature before a reactor that size would be financially responsible.
Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#8What is "energy turnover" in this usage?
[edit]
Found it: "Energy turnover is defined as the amount of heat multiplied by the duration of the discharge[1]." By "amount of heat" I assume they mean "heating power delivered to the plasma" b/c the the only way to multiply by time and get Joules is to start with power.
1: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20230227-wendelstein-7-x-en...
Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#9i’ve been following this project for 10 years. it’s been successful. but how do projects like these move faster? the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity. it’s supposed to be the pre cursor to the producing reactor
Stellarators in particular suffer from very long development cycles. It takes years and years of research to develop the algorithms used to optimize the coil geometries, and then the production of the coils and assembly of the vacuum vessel within the coils is much more challenging than for a tokamak. The coils are hard to produce because they have highly irregular shapes, and tight tolerances. Assembling the vacuum vessel is hard because the coils cover much more of the "toroidal-ish" surface area than in a tokamak.
The is a lot of interesting work going on in stellarator design optimization now, but it will likely be many years before that research is realized in another actual reactor.
Re: Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
#10Ahh, Wendelstein is that stellerator reactor. The stellerator is really cool, and an alternative to a tokamak reactor. Tokamak is the doughnut shaped reactor, and it has a problem where the plasma near the outer circumference has less magnetic confinement. The stellerator is similar, but confines the plasma to a ribbon and folds it over on itself in a mobius-like arrangement. I used to be really interested in this, b…
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