Hacker News Reader

Comment by sien | Hacker News Reader

It's going really well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X

It's not, however, something that designed to directly head toward fusion power itself but instead to better understand components that could be improved to make fusion power.

In addition now with fusion there are heap of companies trying to get fusion power going in about a decade or so. Probably the most interesting of which are:

https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/

and

https://www.cfs.energy/

Who are both using new developments in high temperature superconducting tape fabrication to increase the magnetic field to get to fusion faster than ITER.

View on HN

There was some interesting and encouraging info out of Korea's KSTAR tokamak recently: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111302.h... - the team there have been working on stabilising the plasma inside tokamaks, and have had pretty good success by the sounds of things.

Why not the vortex compression types of "reactors"? a.la http://generalfusion.com/

General Fusion recently gave up on their original design (a spheromak-type plasma inside an imploding liquid metal vortex.) Instead, they're going to a spherical tokamaka where liquid metal compresses the plasma from the outside.

In this new concept, there is now a solid wall on the inside that is not shielded from the plasma by a thick layer of liquid metal. That means power density limits due to limits on wall loading will apply to their reactor, just as they do to conventional DT magnetic fusion reactor schemes. So, the major theoretical engineering advantage of their idea has been lost.

That was a large Bezos Foundation investment wasn't it?

Do you know how close they are to a "real" reactor? Their website seems light on details about that...

I don't understand anything to fusion (except basic stuff), but I like these : https://lppfusion.com/ They publish results often and it's quite entertaining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com