ALL SCI-FI

[Sargon]

The Max Planck Institute completed tests earlier this year on the W7-X Fusion Reactor's magnetic containment cage, after having successfully run helium plasma through it.

Now in a paper published this week they have proven that the containment field was effective, with deviations in the field to be less than 1 in 100,000.

http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-nuclear-fusion-machine-test-2016-12

[Gord Green]

This containment cage is a first step into developing a fusion reactor . The amount of energy and the lack of radioactive waste is a great step forward.

You have to use mag containment because the temperatures created would melt any material used to hold it.

Instead of nuclear fission, which is essentially the splitting of atoms to produce energy while also creating nuclear waste, scientists want to use nuclear fusion. Fusion, which is the joining of atoms, produces heaps of energy, but without radioactive byproducts. A device called the Wendelstein 7-X, or W7-X for short, has made this possible.

In a fusion reactor, hydrogen must be superheated into plasma, but that's a real problem because, as plasma, the substance is so ridiculously hot that it will burn straight through pretty much anything it touches. The W7-X, a stellarator is used to suspend this hot hydrogen in a vacuum using magnetic fields produced with supercooled coils.

If the plasma doesn't touch anything, it can't burn it, and the system works.

What's particularly neat about the entire project is that the only fuel that is need is seawater, which can be used as a source of hydrogen.

With no radioactive waste on the backend, a fusion reactor has the potential to provide the world's with virtually unlimited clean energy.