German scientists to conduct nuclear fusion experiment today | Hacker News Reader

German scientists to conduct nuclear fusion experiment today

theguardian.com

100 pointsmiiiiiike48 comments

"Merkel, who is a doctor of physics, is expected at Wednesday’s event, which is happening in her constituency."

A nation lead by a leader that is both a women and a scientist. I would say this is progress regardless of the experiment outcome.

She's also the daughter of a priest, so we basically have all bases covered :)

"A woman, a priest, a physicist, and chancellor walk into a bar..."

Is it really such a big deal there? I don't think people would be very surprised that a woman can be chancellor.

Note that this fusion experiment is also very 'political'. Without reunification and the wish to promote science in the former East Germany, this experiment would a) never have been funded and b) it would have be cancelled because of steep cost increases and delays. The fusion device was built in North/East Germany, whereas the prior research was done in South Germany.

Thus it is fitting that Chancellor Merkel attends this event.

It's a great experiment and a wonderful achievement, but probably we had different priorities and even different scientific priorities - especially considering the large amount of money invested. There are lots of competing science areas which lack this funding.

I would think being highly competent and good at building political consensus that promoted the good for the people would be the most important things, no matter what gender or profession, no?

Political topics in a country of the size of Germany (and even more in countries like the US or Russia which are much larger and have a much larger political reach) are a very complex and complicated domain. I'd say it helps a lot to have the most intelligent political person at the top. Not that I would agree to all of Merkel's political decisions, but she is without doubt the most intelligent politician in Germany of her generation.

Woman: is good not because woman is inherently better, but don't we have enough of male-only leaders? However if you ask me women may be superior politically to men in general because of dialectic abilities, human considerations when sending people to war, ability to be brutally pragmatic and so forth. So woman = good for me in different ways.

Scientist: I want politicians to do the Right Thing not to build consensus, and I believe a scientist is better in today's world compared to another politician by profession that comes from a different non-specializing background. It could also be an expert linguistic researcher and would be fine as well, but the point is, the new challenges we face are often science related...

"human considerations when sending people to war, ability to be brutally pragmatic" Don't you think these two are contradictory? :-)

Nope... "We need to export freedom and defend our culture" is an abstraction. Pragmatism is another thing.

We have had more than enough example of women leaders who are just as hawkish as men and as diabolical too. Heck, just look at the past ten years across the globe for some who belong in the animal farm camp (as in, I can't tell the difference anymore). Perhaps it just soft discrimination that some think women are more understanding and less likely to be as rotten. Its a political thing, a power thing, it is certain not filtered by the sex of the person

Exactly, just look at Hillary: she's totally a war hawk, whereas Bernie is definitely not.

Seriously, look at all the female candidates we've had in the past half-decade: Sarah Palin (Republican war-hawk and all-around ditzy moron who didn't know Africa isn't a country), Hillary (war hawk, on the payroll of Goldman Sachs, voted for Bush's Iraq invasion), Carly Fiorina (probably the worst tech CEO ever, drove HP straight into the ground and helped destroy Lucent before that, Republican).

If you want someone who isn't going to rush to jump into another war, or someone who really wants to help people at home with better social policies (leave aside the debate on how realistic they are), then you need to look at white men: Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich back in '08, etc.

These days, it seems the sexist feminists would rather vote for a war hawk who'll screw over the middle class for her rich buddies, just because she has a vagina.

I was under the impression that her area of expertise is in chemistry. Or is it that of her husband?

Both. She has a Phd, her husband is a professor in quantum chemistry. That's how they met. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Sauer

Margaret Thatcher was a research chemist.

I remember watching a video of her washing all the goodness out of a bit of dough then baking it into a hard inedible lump of starch. Take from that what you will ;-)

The bit that remains is more protein that starch. This is a great demonstration that you can produce raw gluten in your kitchen, and it's handy for when people start spouting pseudo-science about chemicals in their food.

What, exactly, does it rebut?

Some people seem the think that the gluten that gets added to store-bought bread is an artificial chemical made in a laboratory. This shows that it is quite natural.

Um, I thought gluten was a naturally-occurring part of certain grains, namely wheat and rye and barley (especially wheat, since it's such a huge staple food in the West). It gets added to a lot of stuff (after extracting it from wheat of course), usually to make it stickier, so it's used a lot in baked goods, pastries, etc.

The problem with it is that a small but significant portion of the population either allergies or sensitivities to it, so it's best that they avoid eating it. The rest of us don't have that problem. But those that do look for alternatives, leading to the rise of "gluten-free" foods today. Traditionally, making GF alternatives has been difficult because the gluten is what helps stuff stick together, so GF bread for instance ended up being hard and very brittle, not chewy like normal bread. But GF stuff has gotten better; I think Xanthan gum is a popular gluten substitute in such foods to give the same effect.

Anyway, I'm usually pretty well-aware of pseudoscience regarding stuff like this, "chemicals" in foods, etc., and I've never heard of anyone thinking gluten is an artificial chemical. The GF faddists (the ones who don't have a genuine allergy or sensitivity) usually just think that GF foods are somehow "healthier", though they have absolutely nothing to base this opinion on. However, it's not all bad: because of all these GF faddists, there's a much, much bigger market for GF foods now than there used to be, so people who are genuinely gluten-intolerant now have far more options than they used to. Just 5 years ago, such a person couldn't eat anything from, say, Domino's Pizza if their buddies were ordering from there, but now they can since Domino's has a GF pizza option.

Anyway, there's plenty of foods which are perfectly natural, yet some people can't eat them because they have allergies to them. I believe some people are allergic to shellfish, for instance. And of course, peanuts are a well-known food allergy; they can outright kill people in small doses, even though there's nothing artificial about a peanut. And don't forget the absolute poisons out there like hemlock, ricin, etc. Those are all-natural too. Even apple seeds have small amounts of poison in them.

Yeah, I don't think we disagree about any of that. "Gluten is a chemical" is admittedly not a very common bit of food pseudoscience, but I do see it occasionally. Sometimes the theory is that the added gluten is some kind of industrial byproduct (half true), and sometimes it's that it is somehow "less natural" than other gluten. For whatever reason I think this view is more closely associated with paleo than GF.

Can you give more details of this, or is it some sort of joke/meme?

I'm actually pretty intrigued.

She also grew up in East Germany (before the fall of the Berlin Wall). That's not too astonishing in today's Germany but would have raised a few eyebrows a mere generation ago.

Part of the reason she apparently speaks Russian pretty well. And Russia's president, mr. Putin, is fluent in German because he was stationed there when younger. Quite the antagonising characters in politics these days, but at least they speak each other's language. :)

I'm sure that this fact has already prevented fucks up and smoothed relations between EU and Russia. Despite the Putin's dogs incident...

The Guardian about ITER: "(...) is considered fairly easy to build but extremely difficult to operate." If this is true, ITER is so failed. Wikipedia: "Construction of the ITER Tokamak complex started in 2013[6] and the building costs are now over US$14 billion as of June 2015, some 3 times the original figure.[7] The facility is expected to finish its construction phase in 2019 and will start commissioning the reactor that same year and initiate plasma experiments in 2020". It's so easy to build, that is already 3 times more expensive. And it will be so hard to operate, that it will never work.

"35 countries"

That's the real issue, they could be building a toaster and it would be 3x over budget.

PS: The ITER project was formally agreed to and funded in 2006 with a cost estimate of €10 billion ($12.8 billion) projecting the start of construction in 2008 and completion a decade later So, it's not really massively over budget yet, they just decided to build something else.

Well, the Wendelstein 7X experiment is mostly funded by Germany as an investment into the east/north German science infrastructure. That makes it easier to coordinate, but it's hard to finance such a project. A project, which will have commercial use decades away, and whose commercialization would need much larger funding...

We have actually enough financing needs in the German energy landscape currently: dismantling the nuclear power legacy, find a safe storage for radioactive materials and the research and development of the renewable energy landscape - which is in the hundreds of billions of Euros over the next 35 years.

Just because it's difficult to operate, that doesn't mean it's impossible.

Livestream is live here: http://www.mpg.de/9915939/wendelstein7x

Is fusion something we could expect to become a real source of energy in say the next 15-20 years? I assume just building a fusion reactor will take more than a decade.

from the article

“It’s a very clean source of power, the cleanest you could possibly wish for. We’re not doing this for us but for our children and grandchildren.”

Considering who's putting money into ignition research and alternative modes of fusion (General Fusion vs Tri-Alpha Energy for example) I'd say we should have at least one successful ignition experiment on or before 2020. I would honestly be shocked if nothing of note in that regard didn't happen by 2030 though.

Wendelstein and ITER are supposed to verify whether it's possible to generate net power… with improved designs. So, assuming Wendelstein works as hoped, we will, in a few years, know whether we can start planning an actual fusion power plant (as opposed to a net-negative research reactor).

Then we will need to actual design and build one. If we're lucky, we'll see the first pilot plants in 15-20 years.

So, we're on the same level of "fusion practicability" as in 1960.

Building a nuclear power plant, something we already know how to do inside and out, takes 5-7 years. Barring miraculous breakthroughs in non-magnetic confinement technology, the chances for fusion power on the grid are pretty close to zero.

The running joke is that it's always been 15-20 years away. Since 1960.

Nah, used to be 50-60 years ago, 20 years after that it was 40-50, then 20 years after that 30-40...

Honestly, we could have working devices today. Funding has just been less than expected. Don't forget there was a ~30 year gap between JET and ITER.

PS: There was also initial talks for ITER to be a working power plant, but it was significantly cheaper to downscale the device.

From what I understand it was the downscaling that politicians demanded to reduce costs that caused most of the cost increase. Lots of design parameters had to be changed as a result of it, new technologies developed to get things to work on the smaller scale, etc. There was also a lot of mismanagement in the beginning, with the Japanese management being completely new to the area (the director general was Japan's former ambassador to Croatia). Later, management was restructured several times and now people with experience in plasma physics are in charge. Source: A retired nuclear fusion physicist who was indirectly involved in ITER told me this.

Time to call Elon Musk

We're "two generations" away from commercial power generation: assuming (big assumption) all goes to plan with ITER, the next tokamak would be a full-scale power-generating fusion plant that commercial designs could be based on. Stellerators are one generation behind that: if Wendelstein 7-X works as intended then the next step would be an ITER-equivalent.

That headline sounds like something from the beginning of a superhero movie

If only that kind of money and research was put into properly exploiting the nice big yellow fusion reactor that's already in the sky... No need to worry about plasma abrasion of Tokamak walls and magnetic confinement if that happened.

Germany has spent the most on solar subsidies of any country. Don't make this an exclusive situation. They can do both.

Solar panels aren't the only way.

Solar panels aren't the only renewable subsidized in germany.

I was making the point that they are exploiting the great big fusion reactor in the sky as well. More than other countries.

I think the idea here is to have continuous and reliable base line power that is clean. While solar does present a lot of opportunities it is highly sensitive to weather, in not changes in the Earth's orientation seasonally.

Throw in we have lots of established plants with steam generators a new source of steam would integrate nicely into complex systems we already understand.

To echo one of Shivetya's points: the dominate renewables of solar and wind both need some sort of compliment that can fill in the temporary gaps when either demand is high or supply is low. Hydroelectric is great, but there's not enough of it. We'll see how batteries do, but it's nice to have more than one horse in the race.

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