It works! http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/ 2015/10/featur

>>7712420
It is good news, but please don't overhype this. We are still a long way from proving stellarators are definitely more advantageous than tokamaks to produce fusion power. As a physicsfag (and a european), I'm glad to see a frontier science experiment getting so much coverage though. Let's just not get excited too early.

it's nice that its getting exposure, but ionly a matter of time until /sci/ starts shitting on stellarators in favor of FRCs, not like /sci/ really understands either. it will be just like when /sci/ hyped the fuck out of the shitty general fusion design, or ITER before that.

stellarators are based tho, and behind FRCs are one of the best methods of fusion power production

this is the shit and nothing less

>>7712777
>>7712784

i'm wondering, how comes everyone shits on tokamaks?

>>7712777
This thread exemplifies the total hypocrisy of /sci/. There is absolutely nothing special about about stellarators, it is nothing more than an old slight variation on the tokamak but as it's "OMG LOOKS SO COOOOL" suddenly all of /sci/ is obsessed with it despite it just being a boring non-sustaining plasma test. This is called being a popsci faggot.

>>7712821
We've been hammering away at them for over half a century, and they still don't work, but all the money keeps flowing to them because they have the most established research base because all the money kept flowing to them.

People get a little bitter, especially if they feel their favorite non-tokamak fusion scheme could be made to work much more easily and is being unfairly neglected.

>>7712821
non steady state nature, very finicky controls due to plasma instabilities, ExB drift, strong plasma current required for operation

>>7712831
>There is absolutely nothing special about about stellarators, it is nothing more than an old slight variation on the tokamak
not really. see >>7712834
all problems with tokamaks that arent dont exist in stellarators

>>7712821
People see governance problems and delays with ITER (as if any other international pioneering mega-experiment was different), so they blame the scientific basis of tokamaks like the uniformed morons they are.

>>7712842
Whatever it has done nothing special so far, literally all the hype is because of how it looks. This is popsci.

>>7712843
actually after posting it several times, most people just parrot this >>7712834 and pretend to know what theyre talking about

>>7712850
fusion research isnt popsci
/sci/ is popsci
you cant go to a an indian reservation and expect to see respectable sober residents, just like you cant come to /sci/ and expect knowledgeable or relevant commentary on anything scientific

>>7712854
Stellarators may definitely have an edge over tokamaks. But they have their own problems (like new instabilities coming balloting the plasma), which need investigating. It's just too early to tell right now. This is why W7X is very significant nevertheless.

>>7712860
>coming from* balloting the plasma
also I've just realised that word doesn't have the same meaning in english. I meant shaking the plasma left and right like it does in a stellarator geomtry.

someone tldr what this is for a retard
it contains plasma and boom energy?

>>7712877
>have gas
>ionize it
>heat with microwaves and neutral beams (particle accelerators with a cesium vapor cell to neutralize the ion)
>energetic particles undergo fusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_beam_injection

>>7712877
>fusion energy clean, safe, durable and ultra-heigh energy yield per kg of fuel
>tokamaks simple way to harness it
>much problems, many instabilities
>stellarators may succeed were tokamaks failed
>W7X the largest ever by a large margin
>now turned on
>???
>profit

>>7712877
>Everyone finally tired of the Tokamak
>Taken decades for people to realize it doesn't fucking work
>Old ass idea dug up from the 50s in desperation
>Twist the plasma doughnut so it keeps constant speed or some shit
>Nice idea but wasn't anything special when they tried it back then
>Germans claim they can make it work with precision computer design
>Regardless this won't be an actual self sustaining fusion reactor it's just a routine plasma containment test
>Literally all the hype is because of how it looks
>The fusion meme continues

>>7712890
this man is an idiot, do not listen to him

>>7712890
>>Old ass idea dug up from the 50s in desperation
no, it should have worked then but a technician wired some capacitors in parallel instead of series or vice versa and it failed and nobody found out until 30 years later during deconstruction
>>Twist the plasma doughnut so it keeps constant speed or some shit
>im fucking retarded and love to shitpost
>>Germans claim they can make it work with precision computer design
im sick of hearing this bullshit too, it wasnt designed by a fucking computer, the modelling and simulation was done with a supercomputer, its not like the computer wrote its own plasma physics and E&M codes

>>7712894
>>7712904
It is not going to change anything, this is meme trash, ignore and discuss actual serious science. The money wasted on this crap we could have made an advertising campaign to convince the plebs that fission power isn't that bad. This would have had far more impact than throwing yet more money down yet another doughnut shaped toilet.

>>7712917
>research is throwing money away
>should stay with good old X, why all the extra effort?

>>7712924
>still responding
you're as dumb as that guy

I see the pop science hipsters are coming in to shit on this already.

>>7712924
Don't try it I am only railing against this because fusion power has been a constant letdown. Unless we have a radical new approach (this isn't) We are wasting money.

>>7712942
I don't think we need fundamental breakthroughs. I think that fusion power likely requires extremely complicated, very precise machines, and will be made feasible not by fusion research, but by general progress in fabrication and assembly technology.

Investing, for instance, in advanced automobile manufacture is about as relevant for the eventual achievement of fusion power as directly investing in fusion research.

In short, it's currently too much fucking work to build these things. It takes too much labor and far too long. We'll get fusion right about when robots can build one of these in a month for a million dollars.

>>7713081
you're retarded. if you dont know about the regimes of certain plasma instabilities or contrarily, the stable plasma regions, youre not going to be able to correct these problems that you dont know exist.
and then theres the issue with verification and validation of the analysis thats been done. in theory, theres no difference between theory and practice. in practice there is
stick to youtube videos of QM to impress you're friends. at least with that you can fake being remotely intelligent

>>7713094
>if you dont know about the regimes of certain plasma instabilities or contrarily, the stable plasma regions, youre not going to be able to correct these problems that you dont know exist.
You think we're making meaningful progress when it takes two decades and a billion dollars to build a subscale, zero-fusion prototype?

This is just welfare for physicists. When this kind of schedule is accepted, they know they can put their feet up for their whole career without worrying about ever producing real results.

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>>7713117
>When this kind of schedule is accepted
the "schedule" is dictated by funding. hundreds of tons of magnets, cryogenic systems, 100+ L vacuum chambers, etc arent cheap and you cant move any faster than shitty budgets allow.
>You think we're making meaningful progress when it takes two decades and a billion dollars to build a subscale, zero-fusion prototype?
it doesnt always, pic related

>>7713158
>the "schedule" is dictated by funding.
They spent over a billion dollars on this subscale, non-fusing prototype.

This isn't a "they're not giving us enough money!" problem. This is a "we're describing things that are infeasible to build with existing technology" problem.

You know what would happen if we threw money at fusion researchers to build a net-power fusion reactor as quickly as possible? We'd get worthless technology that costs too much to put to any practical use, just like the Apollo Program and the Space Shuttle.

Fusion researchers lobbying for more funding are not fighting for clean energy, they're fighting for comfy salaried positions and opportuniites for personal glory. And they lie like motherfuckers, exaggerating the benefits and downplaying the nuclear weapon proliferation concerns of actually getting fusion power.

Practical fusion power isn't going to be a product of the fusion research that's being done. It will be the product of general advancements in technology that will make the production of prototypes fast and affordable, and that will make solar power feasible far sooner than fusion. Today's fusion power researchers are pure parasites.

>>7713238
>general advancements in technology
how the fuck do you think those "general advancements" happen? you do R&D. you clearly dont understand how progress is made. it doesnt just advance itself.

>>7713158
Helion Energy is tight shit, they may well BTFO of everyone and give us fusion power by the early 2020s.

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>>7713249
>tfw

I'm sorry but this thing looks fucking stupid. In the trash it goes.

>>7713246
>how the fuck do you think those "general advancements" happen? you do R&D.
Do you know how you get R&D of cost-effective technology? It's sure as fuck not by throwing government money at things. It comes from people working under cost constraints, competing to do things inexpensively, and almost exclusively under the competitive pressures of private industry.

You're not going to get the kinds of industrial robots and 3d printers we'll need for cost-effective fusion reactors by funding fusion research.

Lavishly funded fusion researchers:
a) won't spend their money on fundamental advancements in industrial technology, but rather will aim directly at fusion devices using whatever industrial technology happens to exist, and
b) won't focus on and compete at lowering costs, since it's not their money and budgets are the measure of a bureaucratic project leader's importance.

>>7713238
>production of prototypes fast and affordable
Nah, that only happens when stuff is COTS (commercial off the shelf), which doesn't happen unless there's already a commercially viable market. It's easy to say, "well, let the market guide development", but most revolutionary technologies (computers, CMOS ICs, jet engines, satellite communications, the internet, etc.) were spun off of military projects, i.e. state funded.

>>7713273
>Do you know how you get R&D of cost-effective technology? It's sure as fuck not by throwing government money at things. It comes from people working under cost constraints, competing to do things inexpensively, and almost exclusively under the competitive pressures of private industry.
Just like Lockheed Martin and the vaunted 5th generation F-35 Lightning II right?

>>7713277

Checked.

....at least the F-35 is being produced. And is in service with two USAF wings....

>>7713273
>It's sure as fuck not by throwing government money at things
it sure worked developing fission reactors in less than 20 years from the time that the basic concept of fission was discovered. or the space program. why do you think we have large national labs with so many scientists and engineers? what do you think they work on? you have this ideology and you dont actually understand how things work. your basement philosophy bullshit doesnt correlate to reality

>>7713277
You understand that they're making that as a government contractor, with heaps of government money, right?

That's what a government project is, in the USA. The government doesn't build anything itself, with its own employees. It hires contractors, then it micromanages them, and absorbs the costs when the results aren't good.

The three stages of the Saturn V were built by Boeing, North American, and Douglas. The Apollo Lunar Module was built by Grumman, and the Command and Service Module was built by North American.

>>7713286
>The government doesn't build anything itself, with its own employees
holy fuck youre dumb as shit. the government employs literally tens of thousands of phd scientists, engineers, technicians, etc for research

>>7713289
And what do those PhDs build?

>>7712831
>designed by a super computer
>not special
fuck off retard.

>>7713285
>it sure worked developing fission reactors in less than 20 years from the time that the basic concept of fission was discovered
Fission isn't hard. Even nuclear bombs aren't hard. They're just relatively expensive and detectable large-scale industrial projects.

And fission power still isn't cost-effective. There can't be free experimentation. All designs, all details of their construction and operation, must be approved and then overseen by government, so government inefficiency is inescapable.

>the space program
Rocketry also isn't terribly hard. The issue with them is that suborbital rockets had little application except as weapons of war, so governments claimed them early on. Basically, from the V2 era to the early 2000s, it was essentially impossible for a private company to develop and launch its own orbital rocket on its own initiative, in the legal and regulatory climate that existed.

Even today, private spaceflight is seriously hampered by government oversight and secrecy requirements.

So you're talking about two things that government has not let private industry do. For good reasons in those particular cases, but to claim that government has been responsible primarily for their development rather than for their general lack of development is silly.

>>7713308
>Nuclear bombs aren't hard to make

nigga

What does this mean for my NEET lifestyle and my videogames

>>7713704
Once you have the right isotopes it's literally "smash them together as hard as you can". At least in case of gun assembly it's pretty trivial. Implosion assembly needs extra-fancy ignitors that fire at the same moment, and not with a delay of electric signal over the meter of the wire or so.

Now once you have nuclear weapons, which are somewhat tricky, thermonuclear is trivial, just strap a big can of deuterium and tritium on the nuke.

>>7713729
>the ultra simplified diagram in my undergraduate textbook means that it is easy to construct
God I hate students

>>7713238
>Apollo program
>Worthless
Because it never fed any starving kids in Africa right?

>>7712420
>maintained plasma for a fraction of second
Call me when you maintain it for 30 min minimum mehmet.

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Are we going?

>>7713763

they will do that but noone will call you.

>>7713761

A bit crudely said but the answer is yes.

>>7713094
Please kill urself

>fusion power
>excellent computers
>global capitalism
when do I get to live in a cyberpunk dystopia

Reference: Philadelphia experiment / moebius style electric fields.. prepare for Germany to disappear!

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>>7713806
Like this guy did? reappeared IN the deck?
Is this why there is a 2m thick access door into the stellerator room?

>>7713273

I wonder when we'd see the first nuclear power plant without the government-funded Manhattan project. Just leaving all nuclear research to competetive private entities.

>>7713808
Probably. Keep in mind matter is mostly empty space. If you able to disrupt the covalent bonds or perhaps even on the quantum level. Who the fuck knows? We as species understanding of atomic universe is little over a century old. I'd imagine there's a lot still find out. Probably a great deal that is still hidden from the general public for the issue of safety. Shit, you had boy scout attempt to build a fission reactor in his garage. If you had technology that was even more dangerous- like can fuck with the fabric of the universe, I'd bet you keep a lid on that.

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>>7712831
OH BOY

>>7713294
Vibrators for my new iPhone

TOKAMAKS ON SUICIDE WATCH

>>7713704
>>7713757
I am this guy: >>7713308

I am not this guy: >>7713729

I'm not saying that nuclear bombs are a weekend hobby project. I'm saying that they're not a serious challenge for a well-equipped team of ordinary, common skills in things like precision machining and physics, and the primary difficulty (or rather, expense and difficulty of concealment) is in producing the materials.

The Manhattan Project, in a couple of years, went from there never having been a fission reactor anywhere in the world to having come up with at least three workable ways to enrich uranium, two workable reactor designs to breed plutonium, and two completely different nuclear bomb designs. The first thermonuclear detonation was achieved about seven years after the discovery of fission.

They only produced three actual bombs, though. Production was the problem. Getting designs for all of these things wasn't the hard part. The Soviets stole the designs, and it took them about as long to produce an atomic bomb starting with the detailed plans of how to do so as the Americans took starting only with theory.

The project was given a high funding and personnel priority, but this was still a wartime effort when many supplies and skills were scarce.

The failure to produce fusion power is not for the lack of a Manhattan-Project-like effort. The Manhattan Project was only a ~$25 billion effort, adjusted for inflation ($2 billion in the dollar of the time). Much more has been spent on fusion power research than was spent on the Manhattan Project, as evidenced by this billion-euro non-fusing test apparatus (ITER alone is over $14 billion so far, and still at least five years from starting fusion tests). Fusion is on another level of technical difficulty, which (by conventional approaches believed likely to work) requires very large, extremely precise and complicated apparatus, which our current technology doesn't allow us to build in rapid iterations.