Livestream of Wendelstein 7-X Stellerator being turned on

http://www.ipp.mpg.de/livestream_e_16

by rkangel • 10 years ago

108 55 10 years ago

ipp.mpg.de

iokevins• 10 years ago

From Wikipedia: The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator (nuclear fusion reactor) built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik (IPP), and completed in October 2015. It is a further development of Wendelstein 7-AS. The purpose of Wendelstein 7-X is to evaluate the main components of a future fusion reactor built using stellarator technology, even if Wendelstein 7-X itself is not an economical fusion power plant.

The Wendelstein 7-X reactor is the largest fusion device created using the stellarator concept which was the brainchild of physicist Lyman Spitzer. It is planned to operate with up to 30 minutes of continuous plasma discharge, demonstrating an essential feature of a future power plant: continuous operation.

The name of the project, referring to the mountain Wendelstein in Bavaria, was decided at the end of the 1950s, referencing the preceding project from Princeton University under the name Project Matterhorn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X

anc84• 10 years ago

Fehler: Die Webseite 'www.ipp.mpg.de' ist momentan nicht verfügbar

dalbin• 10 years ago

Direct access to the stream : http://webcast.nc3-cdn.com/clients/mpg/2016/02/03/en/

mariuolo2• 10 years ago

Am I missing something or the actual turning on was not shown?

Perhaps later today?

cos2pi• 10 years ago

You can follow the event per livestream on 3 February 2016 at 2.45 p.m. CET.

The program should begin at any time.

EDIT: Err, CET... UTC+1. So, perhaps it is over?

ajmurmann2• 10 years ago

Yeah, it should have started almost an hour ago and actually be just about over.

superkuh• 10 years ago

It was shown. It lasted for a bit less than a second. They are not running it longer right now because they cannot handle the thermal load.

mabbo• 10 years ago

The tl;dr of this is that if the Wendelstein works, and works well, we're potentially only a few years away from building a fusion reactor that generates large amounts of clean power at extremely low cost.

If it doesn't work, well, they'll keep trying.

It's like when SpaceX landed that rocket over the ocean (without a barge) then let it crash- if they succeed, the cool stuff comes next.

celticninja• 10 years ago

im not sure they let it crash, i think that bit was an accident.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

They didn't stick a barge under it for the early tests:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_booster_landing_tests...

maaku• 10 years ago

Different event.

petra• 10 years ago

Between this, and moltex , which claims to have designed an intrinsically safe molten-salt nuclear reactor same capital costs of coal, hence cheaper than coal , the future of clean energy look bright.

mng2• 10 years ago

we're potentially only a few years away

The press loves to hype this sort of thing but I think if you talk to most scientists in the field they'll be much more circumspect about getting to commercial fusion. Personally I think it's at least twenty years out, and that's if everything goes well, which it will not.

dest• 10 years ago

Pictures of amazing W7X magnets, if I am not mistaken https://imgur.com/a/We3fk

lorenzhs3• 10 years ago

For anyone tuning in now, the event is already over, and German media report that it was a success. I can't find a decent English-language source yet, surely there will be reports on it soon. Most of the German articles have lots of immediately obvious inaccuracies as well right now...

EDIT: There's another post on the front page right now that has a recording of the event: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/watch-germany-switch-their... discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11026559

pmontra• 10 years ago

The video is in English. You can skip to about 38:00 and watch the ignition sequence and listen to some explanations from the speaker.

maremmano• 10 years ago

apparently it worked: https://translate.google.it/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...

lorenzhs3• 10 years ago

There's an egregious mistranslation in there. In a section where nuclear fusion is compared to fission, the German article reads

    Das ist ungefährlicher und hinterlässt weniger stark verstrahlten Atommüll

the translation is

    This is dangerous and leaves less severely contaminated nuclear waste

whereas it should be

    This is *less* dangerous and leaves less strongly contaminated nuclear waste

The translation completely negated the sentence. The rest is pretty okay-ish.

bassislife2• 10 years ago

less dangerous? or "not more" dangerous?

numlocked• 10 years ago

I've read a lot about the design and construction of the 7-X, but I've never read why there are so many "portholes" all over the thing. There are a comically large number of them, everywhere, of totally different sizes, shapes, and at weird angles. Why are so many holes/ports necessary, and why is there so little homogeneity?

sbierwagen3• 10 years ago

It's an experimental device, the ports are needed for instrumentation. A utility-scale fusor would have many fewer of them.

The ITER vacuum vessel also looks pretty funny, though much more symmetrical: https://www.iter.org/mach/vacuumvessel

The ITER design is also dramatically complicated by the need to have robots fit in there to replace blanket modules.

db48x• 10 years ago

It's a scientific instrument, not a power plant. The portholes are to allow all the measurements and tests that they plan to do over the life of the machine.

the84723• 10 years ago

Why are so many holes/ports necessary

It's designed to be maintained from the inside. So you need to get replacement/upgrade/experiment parts inside where you need them.

and why is there so little homogeneity?

stellarators are highly asymmetrical

theoh• 10 years ago

It does appear to have five-fold rotational symmetry, at least in the way the coils are distributed.

Geee• 10 years ago

Time-lapse video of the building process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJpSrqitSMQ

thrownaway24243• 10 years ago

How do you take energy off one of these?

sbierwagen3• 10 years ago

Just by using it as a regular heat source to boil water, then running the steam through turbines, like any other thermal power plant.

There are schemes to convert charged particle flux directly into electricity, but I'm not aware of any fusion power experiments that use them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion

thrownaway24243• 10 years ago

That was a little bit vague. How does the heat actually get out of this thing and into the water? If the plasma is confined in a magnetic field, not in contact with the shell, and the shell is super-cooled to 4K, I'm a little lost on how it would work in practice.

jasonwatkinspdx• 10 years ago

http://www.helionenergy.com plans to do direct conversion. It's a follow on to previous university work, dunno if they tested/measured that part.

NikolaeVarius• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Heating

The one I heard of was the neutron blanket method

thrownaway24243• 10 years ago

Isn't that how they heat the core to initiate fusion? That's the opposite of what I'm asking.

There's absolutely no question nor doubt that every fusion research reactor in history has been capable of sinking a tremendous amount of power :)

Edit: ah, I imagine you meant to direct me to the later "Power production" paragraph.

WorkLobster• 10 years ago

The current front-runner seems to be a blanket of water surrounding the reactor vessel, which is heated by the stray neutrons from the fusion reaction.

It has the double-win that if Lithium is added, the high energy neutrons end up breeding more Tritium fuel.

maga• 10 years ago

What are the results? I've read they were going to keep the plasma stable for half an hour, have they been able to do that?

obsurveyor• 10 years ago

No, they want to do this by 2020.

ajmurmann2• 10 years ago

Can you imagine the chancellor our president coming by for a launch event when you run your software for the very first time that you've never run before not even I an integration test after coding on it for years?!

Phlarp• 10 years ago

I suspect they had a very robust testing regime for both the software and the hardware used in this project. As well as more formal mathematical proofs of the physics to back up their engineering.

A better analogy might be for rockets / spaceflight-- where individual systems are rigorously tested independently, but a live launch is the only place that they all come together and have to function as one tightly coupled system.

engi_nerd• 10 years ago

A better analogy might be for rockets / spaceflight-- where individual systems are rigorously tested independently, but a live launch is the only place that they all come together and have to function as one tightly coupled system.

I understand the point that you are trying to make, but your analogy is a bit poorly chosen.

Speaking from my days as a sounding rocket telemetry engineer, we performed lots of tests of the individual systems, as you say. But then we also put everything together and performed several "sequence tests" where the entire vehicle (minus the motor) was assembled and tested as if the countdown were real. All events were triggered as if the vehicle were in flight, and experiment systems were tested to ensure they would power on as expected and provide real data. If we had any deployables, the deployment mechanism would be tested to the maximum extent possible. These sequence tests happened off the rail (in special testing facilities) and on the rail (fully assembled in launch configuration, with a motor).

Basically, if you wait until the actual launch to perform integration tests of all of this, you WILL fail. There are too many pieces that need to function in concert to expect them to all work without integration testing.

the84723• 10 years ago

There have already been helium plasma tests in the previous months. This is just the first hydrogen plasma firing.

frik2• 10 years ago

Well, that's why it's the second run. The first one can be watched there: https://youtu.be/R_kPM1J-F0Q?t=3m49s

(read the comments below their videos on their youtube channel to understand the difference)

frik2• 10 years ago

On 10th December 2015 the have done almost the same experiment: https://youtu.be/R_kPM1J-F0Q?t=3m49s

IanCal• 10 years ago

A bit of googling didn't hit on much, but is there a plan for what happens in the future if this continues to go well? In the same way that ITER would be followed by DEMO then hopefully more commercial reactors.

Livestream of Wendelstein 7-X Stellerator being turned on

Related Stories