If you've heard of fusion energy, you've probably heard of tokamaks. These doughnut-shaped devices are meant to cage ionized gases called plasmas in magnetic fields while heating them to the outlandish temperatures needed for hydrogen nuclei to fuse. Tokamaks are the workhorses of fusion—solid, symmetrical, and relatively straightforward to engineer—but progress with them has been plodding. Now, tokamaks' rebellious cousin is stepping out of the shadows. In a gleaming research lab in Germany's northeastern corner, researchers are preparing to switch on a fusion device called a stellarator, the largest ever built. The €1 billion machine, known as Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), appears now as a 16-meter-wide ring of gleaming metal bristling with devices of all shapes and sizes, innumerable cables trailing off to unknown destinations, and technicians tinkering with it here and there. It looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet. Inside are 50 6-tonne magnet coils, strangely twisted as if trampled by an angry giant. Although stellarators are similar in principle to tokamaks, they have long been dark horses in fusion energy research because tokamaks are better at keeping gas trapped and holding on to the heat needed… Read full this story
- Fallout 4: The Nuclear Option (The Railroad) walkthrough
- Fallout 4: The Nuclear Option (Brotherhood of Steel) walkthrough
- Amazon's free game engine could legally run nuclear reactors during zombie attack
- Fallout 76 Gameplay, World Details, Nuclear Silos, PVP Elements, Building, And Beta
- Google Translate warns of APOCALYPSE with bizarre ‘end times’ message about the Antichrist
- Save up your bottlecaps as you can now buy a $400 replica of Fallout 4’s Alien Blaster
- Major events in the Fallout timeline
- Civilization 6 Science Victory
- Observation review: a horror story through the eyes of AI
- Ranking the PSVR’s upcoming lineup
The bizarre reactor that might save nuclear fusion have 297 words, post on www.sciencemag.org at October 21, 2015. This is cached page on IT Breaking News. If you want remove this page, please contact us.