/sci/ - Science & Math

>>7710162
>>7710165
>>7710168

This is a SFW board anon.

>>7710162

>>7710161
>The complex shape and arrangement of the superconducting magnetic coils was designed by a supercomputer allowing it to confine the plasma indefinitely unlike tokamaks.

they try to contain milk with rubberbands... how can they think this will ever work.

>>7710171
Fukc this. Post more German ingenuity, OP.

>>7710181
>they try to contain milk with rubberbands... how can they think this will ever work.

man if your dad had contained his milk with a rubberband i wouldn't have had to read that stupid comment

>>7710181
The plasma never actually touches anything, its suspended in a magnetic field.

>>7710183
here you go /pol/, a jew made this and the hitler made him an honorary aryan for his ingenuity

>>7710189
haha that burn thanks man!

>>7710174
damn you

>>7710183

post pics of qt german girl feet

>>7710162
>>7710165
>>7710168
sexy as fuck desu senpai

>>7710161
>Getting excited over 50's technology

>>7710161

holy shit OP I just talked about it a few hours ago

is there a video stream or something?

>>7710193
Hitler didn't make him an honorary Aryan, that was only what he was promised in Buchenwald concentration camp as a reward for designing it. But the war ended before he could fully complete the design and he only manufactured it after the war.

>>7710181

except its not rubberbands and you are an idiot

>>7710181
>milk with rubber bands

It's like you don't know what an analogy is.

>>7710171
kek, still diamonds though

>>7710161
>german machine
>german sounding name
>awesome and terrifying looking at once
what can possibly go wrong?

>>7710215
Still got cracked.

>>7710161
reminds me of planetes

>>7710161
>the superconducting magnetic coils was designed by a supercomputer
so... is this the leap into the singularity as computers look to overthrow us all in one fell swoop and turn the 3d quantum into a 2d plasma field?

>>7710162
Looks like a pair of fish laughing.

What would happen if the plasma confinement fails?

so the shape would make the plasma behave like getting into a roller coaster donut that also spins?

>>7710816
A bunch of very expensive superconducting magnets are ruined, and maybe something catches fire but probably not.

>>7710808

>>7710857
Stop memeing this bullshit, it's not even a real fusion reactor, just a fancy looking concept test. Fusion is fast becoming /x/ tier and as such I don't want to see it on /sci/ anymore

cool i need a new toaster.

>>7710876
That fancy looking concept test will provide running fusion for 30 minutes and is only possible due to recent advances in fluid mechanics modelling. You Sir, belong on /x

>>7710876

another idiot spotted

>>7710802
i dont think you understand how modelling/simulation works

>>7710181

>I have absolutely no idea what in the literal fuck I'm talking about and trying to offer an opinion on something that is so many magnitudes above my realm of thinking I can't even comprehend it

What does the weird twisty thing do to contain plasma better than the tokamak?

Is there a videostream/live update for when it's happening?

And what would this do in my life? Shitpost.

These guys are building something that holds plasma? God already made that a 5,000 years ago lmao

>>7711252
The twistyness keeps the plasma contained better. Basically it boils down to a torus having different inner and outer diameters. In a stellarator the ions go around in a corkscrew pattern so they all travel p much the same distance each time around

>>7710645
What about 40s?
That thing was what began the space exploration.

The engines haven't changed much ever since.

>>7710183
>>7710183

>>7710162
>>7710165
>>7710168

This shit turns me on

>>7710888
It doesn't put out more power than it takes in therefore it is trash just like very other fusion reactor ever
>>7711717
At least the concept worked from day one. This is an old canned idea that has been brought back out of the bottom of the barrel because we have failed to come up with any better ideas.

>>7710161
>Wendelstein
Sounds pretty great.

>>7710738
Its maintained by syrian refugess

>>7710174
dude..... bwaahhhhahha

why does it have such a weird shape?

We live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVpm-u7fnw&feature=youtu.be

>>7711789
funny way plasma interacts with magnetic field. Doesn't move in straight line but corkscrew path.

Its habening

>>7710162
>>7710165
>>7710168
>>7710857

I... I can see her insides!!

how lewd,

please, Wendelstein 7-X stellerator, cover yourself!!

KYAAAAAAAAA

Why is /pol/ more interested in this shit than /sci/?

>>7711836
Pretty sad isn't it?

>>7711836
I noticed this too.
Also wondering why.

>>7711836
'cause it's...

*drumroll....*

GERMAN!

*Badum-tsss*

Yeah, the reason is exactly this retarded.

>>7711836
Came here from /pol/ to see how active it was here.

Crazy

>>7711836
/pol/ is waiting for it to malfunction and kill everyone inside.

>>7711840
>>>/reddit/

Well there you go then, make one of these beasts in future instead of a Tokamak.

>>7711836
because this is a dead board with no culture and I start science threads on there instead of here

Can anyone explain how this is
supposed to work?

>>7711865
I may be wrong but it seems to be heated coils are sustaining plasma at a rate in which it can be reused. People are theorizing that the plasma will be turned into a renewable energy source capable of outclassing oil and other forms of energy. It may be a form of nuclear fusion but I'm not sure.

>>7711865
plasma is heated with neutral beams and microwaves and contained via magnetic fields

>>7711869
how do you actually use plasma as energy source?

>>7711703
>>7711806
not really. a tokamaks plasma also has helical winding, the difference being that its poloidal field is induced via a large plasma current, whereas the stellarators is directly made from magnetic field coils. stellarators require no plasma current for plasma stability and exhibit no ExB plasma drift as a result

>>7711877
If you heat atoms up to a hot enough temperature, the collisions are powerful enough that the two colliding atoms undergo fusion. By doing this, they lose a part of their mass as energy.

By using part of this energy to sustain the high temperatures and the magnetic field used to sustain the plasma, while the remaining energy can be used to generate power.

>>7711869
not renewable *technically*, but so efficient and "burning" resource so common, humanity won't be able to make a noticeable dent in the world resources in millennia to come.

I mean you need several kilograms of deuterium to keep it running for years producing many megawatts of power - and several kilograms of deuterium is found in a moderately sized swimming pool of seawater.

>>7711877
It's essentially the same reaction as hydrogen bomb, but instead of a single massive bang, slightly more fuel is added while the plasma is not allowed to dissipate, and instead excites the extra fuel at roughly the rate it burns ("fusions") away.

Lots of heat is produced. Heat can be collected by coolant liquid, liquid goes to the turbines and these turn generators, just like in a classic coal or nuclear power plant. The only difference is the source of heat which is a sustained hydrogen fusion.

Current problem: the magnets that keep the fusion in check draw more energy than can be extracted from the plasma. Not an inherent property of the process, but an engineering shortcoming everyone tries to overcome.

>>7711869
same anon
Imagine it like a guinea pig inside a wheel. The pig runs and the more it runs the more power is generated through centrifugal force. The guinea pig has to take breaks because its own energy needs to recharge. The amount of time in between the guinea pig resting and starting back up to the apex of energy production takes too long so you look for an alternative. You reconstruct the wheel to produce more energy in a single rotation but the resting period is still a problem. Then you look for an alternative to the runner. You construct a mechanical being to do the running instead and then modify it to rest shorter; thus increasing energy production. The stellerator is the new wheel and the plasma is the new guinea pig. What happened earlier was a test to see if it can be done. Soon it will be modified to produce more energy but the main problem at the moment is developing a way to maximize the energy production because right now it takes more to get it moving and maintained than it is to siphon it.

>>7711894
dont make analogies like this

>>7711897
You don't like the Guinea Wheel?

>>7711898
nor hamster pig.

>>7711898
just say whats happening otherwise people get confused. its the same as a fission reactor, but uses mass defect from fusion instead of fission. can be used on a thermal cycle or with direct conversion once more advanced fuel cycles become viable

>>7710161
>implying this isn't a shitty attempt to build a time machine and bring back the furher

You know they miss him dearly

>>7711902
The path is here now
all we need do is reach out and take it....

Space travel boys
Anitmatter
Energy galore

We can finally escape...

Virtual reality
Infinite food
Robots to do the work for us
Farming, Mining
Bio Cloning
Bio Wombs
Touchable holography
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFHym_W6vkE [Embed]

EDEN

So did they turn it on already?

>>7711836
Not a meaningful comparison. /pol/'s got like 20 or 30 times more traffic than this board in the first place.

Oooh.
All who wait for it to blow up, bad news for you. It can't. You'll have to wait until end of January for that.

> Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium—an unreactive gas—so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy.

http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/10/feature-bizarre-reactor-might-save-nuclear-fusion

So it's just tested on dummy fuel, to check if it can run at all. There's no fusion reaction currently. A test, dry run.

/pol/ dun goofed like always.

>>7711961
>things never malfunction during tests

>>7711375
Well that might change everything, but okay.

>>7711754
>trash just like very other fusion reactor ever
Give it time mate, give it time.

>>7711836
'tis about economical stuff as well. But yeah, pretty sad.

>>7711865
It's a sun.

>>7711869
It sure is nuclear fusion, however, ain't as dangerous as it was in, for example, Chernobyl.

Can someone explain what all those components on top do, or at least why it looks so irregular?

>>7712153
Those are just some pictures of the Wendelstein 7-X.

>>7711978
Well, try to test a nuke with all plutonium replaced by cheese. Yeah, the primary charge can go bang but good luck getting a kiloton out of it.

So apparently it ran for 1/10th of a second...is that better than most tokamaks?

>>7712165
In theory, indeed. Right now, it just wastes a lot of money. But the idea is amazing, we need to be patient.

>>7712153
>why it looks so irregular?
a super computer designed it.

special snowflake humans aren't smart enough to design things like that, they need muh patterns.

The test firing was a success: http://www.ipp.mpg.de/3984226/12_15

>>7712199
They pulled a plasma test as well as a helium test today?! O.0

>>7712211

>>7712153
see this toroid? see the toroidal coils going around it? if all you have were those toroidal coils, the difference between the inner and outer diameter will cause drift

so in order to fix this you want the magnetic field lines to have this helical shape (in the direction of the arrows)

tokamaks do that by inducing a current in the plasma by adding the poloidal coils, but this cannot be done continuously which is why they operate in pulse mode

stellarators avoid having to add the poloidal coil all together and seek to make the magnetic field lines helical throug manipulating the shape of the toroidal coils

humans can't do this because the shape is so complex and needed supercomputer aided design

>>7710189
#bantz

>>7712139
>ain't as dangerous as it was in, for example, Chernobyl
there are no parallels between fusion and chernobyl

>>7712228
That is correct. Still, a Power Station using Fusing wouldn't be built in Germany, since it is about Deuterium & Tritium, those are radioactive. I guess politicans don't want any more scandals in Germany, which is why they act like the retarded Primates they are.

>>7711961
stop raining on the parade

we've already achieved fusion, we just can't do it continously

this test shows the coil shape arranged by the supercomputer works, doesn't leak, and can contain plasma indefinitely.

the hardest part is over (relatively speaking) because everything else that comes after it is treaded ground

>>7712244
only tritium is radioactive, and there are other fuel cycles that dont require radioactive elements, like D-He3

>>7712199
>tfw we can almost fuse fucking atoms but can't develop a decent color camera

>>7712271
Without Bayer filter camera sensor can catch more light. They just didn't need colour picture.

>>7712199
what if an engineer was trapped in there when it turned on? will he become dr. wendelstein and obtain god like powers?

>>7712277
Wouldn't a 1000000°C helium plasma be extremely bright? Why would they need extra brightness sensitivity?

>>7712246
So it's basically guaranteed to produce net energy once they switch the fuel over to hydrogen next year? Seems like this would be way bigger news if that was the case.

>>7711836
So they can make refugee jokes about it.

>>7712286
It's not bigger the news because the jews are trying to surpress any news that glorifies German science. They will probably sabotage the machine.

>>7712286
Their goal was never to produce fusion power. The device itself is way smaller than the Joint European Torus (world's largest tokamak). It was to test the stellarator configuration on the largest scale ever.

If we find that this geometry is indeed more advantageous than tokamaks, DEMO (project for the first economical reactor) could well be a stellarator. The W7X is an exploratory experiement, but that strips none of its value. It is a crucial step in the fusion community.

(Sorry for my shitty english.)

>>7712278
He'll die of hypoxia as the reactor is being evacuated.

>>7712311
And then his corpse would be reduced to elementary particles by the absurd temperatures

>>7712278
yes

>>7712326
And he will grow stronger with each passing nanosecond

>>7712271
At temperatures of 1 million degrees color there isn't much use for color. Everything will either be black or blindingly bright.

>>7711887
>Heat can be collected by coolant liquid, liquid goes to the turbines and these turn generators
Humanity really needs to come up with a more sci-fi solution to create electricity.

Having a reactor with super-cool super-conducting magnetic coils holding plasma in a vaccuum that is shot at with microwave lasers to achieve nuclear fusion kind of loses its luster when you just strap it into a contraption that hasn't fundamentally changed since 1880.

>>7712282
shutter time

>>7712299
Your English is much better than most native posters.

>>7712299
So if there are no further complications with getting the fusion to run in January, what is even the hangup anymore after that?
What else is stopping them from planning the first real fusion plant? How are we still at "eh, maybe in 50 years", if this thing might already keep a fusion running for extended periods? Is it that hard to scale it up and extract the energy it produces effectively?

>>7712369
I know, I just add that disclaimer at the end of all my posts to make native English speakers feel insecure.

How does it feel to be the last monoglots left on this planet?

>>7712366
So it means we just do not have a good / fast enough cameras

>>7712382
there are tons of complications

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Criticism

>>7712387

fucking idiots like you have stopped scientific progress since the beginning of time and new ideas. If you don't attempt to do it, you can't eliminate the flaws and you will burn tons of carbon, slowly destroying the earth.
So don't cry about the flaws and give a better option...

sucker

>>7711754
The last 20 years, inb4 years meme, has seen more advancement on the energy in > energy out ratio than ever before.

Fusion power is the only long term option humanity has. Our rate of growth eclipsed the rate of (if you believe) the Earth's oil production decades ago. Renewables require energy storage and grid advancements that will take 40 years to reach, nevermind that massive wind farms fuck up the weather and solar panels on a global supply scale take massive amounts of dwindling REEs.
If I had the wealth of Apple I would selectively donate half of my cash to fusion research projects, something like 40 times more than the pissant paltry meager sums the entire field has received over 30 years.

Imagine where we'd be if they actually had the money to proceed no-frills.

>inb4 VSG pipes in with his "impossible to create a true gravity fed fusion"
Yeah, no shit asshole.
Electromagnetics, materials science, is the key. Not 15 years ago "high temperature" superconductors were simply the fantasy toy of highly funded esoteric labs that played with one possibly working sample a year. Now there are dozens of samples, with working options available next decade.
With higher operating temp superconductors the power req to maintain a pressure field decreases exponentially, the cooling requirements (which could/would be shunted off to a steam powered electricity generator anyways) are drastically reduced.

It takes 2 billion dollars to create the next processor line with only 5% more performance per watt than the last, and they get thrown away next year.

It took 2 billion dollars over 15 years to make this one test, of something infinitely more important (long term). What if money like that was put into the fusion field since 1990? Instead of scraping the barrel?
VSG, would you rather be hopelessly pessimistic about unknowns, yet always dismayed by the short sighted goals of our race, or would you rather put effort and resource to something that may be the answer?

>>7712417
I'm the OP. What are you on about son? You asked if there are further complications and I told you.

Neutron bombardment shielding is one of them.

Are you one of those armchair futurologists who circlejerk over other people's accomplishments while smoking weed and talking about the singularity?

>>7712387
Thanks.
The only real issue there seems to be the matter of those high energy neutrons bombarding the containment until it breaks.
That's the sort of annoying trial-and-error hang-up I was looking for.

Though I did gather that the problem apparently really isn't building a plant anymore. It's just building one that actually runs smoothely enough to eventually financially break even.

>>7712427
That's not me. Again, thanks, that really helped me.

>>7712425
I was actually annoyed when I learned Zuckerberg would put all his fantastillion billion dollars into education of poor kids. I mean, that's nice and all, but humanity as a whole species has bigger problems right now than Africa not producing enough engineers.

>>7712434
People who give their money to charity piss me off. Why feed starving children when we can send them to the moon?

I live just 1km away from the wendlstein. is there a possible explosion or sonething like that?

>>7712453
they'll starve on the moon you idort

>>7711845
>and kill everyone inside.
I'm sure it will do this even without mailfunction.

>>7710181

sup Ken

>>7712458
At most, a very localized one inside the room if the cooling system explodes. Nothing major. The reactor is perfectly safe if you aren't crawling into it or stand right next to it.
Hell as long as it's only running plasma tests you might even stand next to it, I suppose. Unless the cooling system explodes, of course.

Also they already ran their first test and it went fine.

>>7712469
>>7712458
Wait, you live near Wendelstein? Well, the experiment is being held in Mecklenburg Vorpommern and is just named after Wendelstein for some reason, so you are especially safe.

>>7712458
No, you're fine. Don't worry about it. If anything, try to get a tour or something.

>>7712199
gif of the plasma

>>7712475

it's allready loooking as if the plasma doesn't want to match up to the intended design configuration, it's ogre for pretzelfuzion

>>7712458

fusion is completely 100% more safe than any form of energy, perhaps excluding solar cells

I can't help but think that this machine looks like something Otomo would design for Akira.

>>7712458
fellow Greifswalder here

i was in the lecture hall at Greifswald university today watching the stream.
was pretty cool when the whole room went 'ohhh' when Klinger mixed up celsius and kelvin

Humanity wins again.
And never forget: say no to racism.

>>7712596
it hurts

>>7712354
Direct electrical conversion of fusion power is possible - the output is high-energy charged particles, so you can harness those for electrical power. But the fusion fuels easiest to fuse put out a lot of their energy in neutrons, which can only be harnessed by letting them run into something and then harnessing the resulting heat.

>>7712565

pls tell me more

bitte erzähl mir mehr

can I watch the stream somewhere?
was there something extraordinary happening?
how long did it take insgesamt and when did it start?

grüße aus Wien

>>7712596
>obama isn't person of the year
TIME magazine officially racist

let's talk about polywells and fusors

>>7712844
nah

>>7712634
well the whole procedure took about 30 minutes. they started the live stream at about 13:00 local time and our university (same city) streamed it live in the lecture hall of the physics institute because we work with the IPP people closely.

they went through the 'stages' necessary for creating a plasma (vacuum, gas, magnets, etc.) and checked if all was ready in order. then they loaded up a premade experimental cycle taking about 1 minute and at the end of that a small plasma flashed to life.

no way this was the 'first' time they've seen it. you don't build that cycle and then wait until a bunch of people are looking with cameras to click start. they tested it before for sure.

the guy 'hosting' is a Prof who also lectures at our institute and he switched back between German and English, made a few jokes, mixed up temperatures. fun event all in all but in the end they just turned on a giant plasma lamp.

Dude, yes... light sabers are a possibility that means...

>>7711351

This thread helps piece together all of the forces with time being the universal carrier..

Lightsabers are coming soon!

Ultrasabers.com says combat ready lightsabers!
Hell yes!