Watch Germany Switch on Its Experimental Fusion Reactor Live | Hacker News Reader

Watch Germany Switch on Its Experimental Fusion Reactor Live

iflscience.com

40 pointsinsulanian10 comments

>... switched on by German chancellor Angela Merkel – who herself has a doctorate in physics.

Why can't we get scientists in politics? :-(

I mean, a constitutional law professor isn't bad, and we've had an engineer president once before, but those were the high points.

I have no reason to doubt the technical skill of the engineer.

The constitutional law professor, on the other hand, seems to repeatedly demonstrate either ignorance or contempt of that document, based upon the actions of his administration.

Who are you to say what the constitution says! He is a professor and knows more than you!

Seems it's all over already: http://www.ipp.mpg.de/livestream_e_16

Countdown was at 3:35pm, ending at 3:50pm. It's past 4pm local time now and the live stream is only showing the test video.

EDIT: They have an official YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/plasmaphysik/videos but haven't updated it yet. There's the video from December showing the helium plasma, though.

Now there is a speech by someone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmFeG44euHY (Watching to see if there is anything more...)

Update: Looots of speeches.

update2: Here is the interesting bit with someting happening, almost at the end: https://youtu.be/KmFeG44euHY?t=2548

I was a bit confused when it looked like the presenter was introducing Angela Merkel and then Sibylle Günter from MPI was the first speaker (Merkel herself steps up roughly half-way through).

But yeah, it's rather uneventful to watch if you're not intimately familiar with what's actually going on in that one second. Definitely not worth watching for the speeches.

So, if is a success this could maintain the reaction itself?

Which would be the next steps? Building a realone that could produce energy?

The presentation in the video[1] has a chart comparing it to other research reactors

Older version of this chart on page 20 of this pdf[2].

Stellarators are still lagging behind tokamaks due to lower funding and higher complexity of the asymmetric plasma.

[1] https://youtu.be/KmFeG44euHY?t=478 [2] http://esv-paf.de/images/stories/energie_fuer_alle_wochen/au...

Will this produce more energy than it consumes?

No, it won't produce much energy at all. They're only doing hydrogen and later deuterium, i.e. no tritium injections. That'll only undergo minimal amounts of fusion, so little that the reactor will barely get irradiated and can be modified.

The goal is to learn what's necessary to build a bigger device.

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