GREIFSWALD, Germany (AP) — Scientists are poised to flip the switch on an experiment that could take them a step closer to the goal of generating clean and cheap nuclear power.
A German nuclear fusion experiment has produced a special super-hot gas which scientists hope will eventually lead to clean, cheap energy.
The helium plasma — a cloud of loose, charged particles — lasted just a tenth of a second and was about one million degrees Celsius.
It was hailed as a breakthrough for the Max Planck Institute’s stellarator — a chamber whose design differs from the tokamak fusion devices used elsewhere.
On Thursday, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics fired up a monster machine that it hopes will change the world.
The machine is called the Wendelstein 7-X, or W7-X for short. It’s a type of nuclear-fusion machine called a stellarator and is the largest, most sophisticated of its kind.
Start of operation and first plasma in the Wendelstein 7-X fusion research device at IPP Greifswald.
I recall when Venter made the first synthetic unique life form he said biofuels and algae that soaks up carbon dioxide would come out of it. Feels like it has been slow going but here is a why and why no item and please read the comments too as they are also informative.
From powering airplanes to replacing nuclear energy, algae has been touted as a green energy miracle. So if our waterways are already filled with the stuff, why isn’t it filling the world’s skies with biofueled planes? Algae is a tricky creature that presents a lot of challenges and misconceptions. Here’s why it’s difficult to harness—and why it could big a big payoff.
As we previously reported, algae is a fuel source that’s vastly more eco-friendly than oil, and will be crucial as we head into a future filled with climate change and depleting fossil fuels.
Continue reading “Why Algae Could Be the Greatest—and Trickiest—Fuel Source of All” »
Interesting…
To suggest that quantum mechanics and gravity are on the verge of being reconciled would be, to the physics world at least, as significant as the discover of splitting the atom. While splitting the atom might have led to the nuclear bomb, it also led to the technology of nuclear power, i.e. nuclear fission, which, if harnessed properly, creates a renewable and sustainable energy resource. The problem has always been that quantum mechanics — the rules that govern sub-atomic particles — and gravity, the rule that governs mass as we know it (the stuff we can touch and feel), do not agree with each other. The question has always been, what is it that “unifies” these two theories? Is quantum mechanics God playing dice, as Einstein suggested?
“God doesn’t play dice with the universe.”
Scientists have proposed a laser model that can could heat materials to temperatures hotter than the centre of the Sun in just 20 quadrillionths of a second. That’s 10 million degrees Celsius almost instantaneously.
The discovery brings us one step closer to the dream of achieving thermonuclear fusion energy — the production of clean, sustainable, and limitless energy using the same process the Sun uses to produce heat.
The challenge in harnessing the energy from thermonuclear fusion is that, as with any form of energy production, you need to get out more than you put in, and heating things to temperatures that rival the centre of the Sun is not easy. Current laser technology has failed to make the heating process efficient enough to make the process worthwhile, but a team from Imperial College London in the UK has come up with a model for a laser than can heat things about 100 times faster than the world’s most powerful fusion experiments.
If “The Stellarator” sounds like an energy source of comic book legend to you, you’re not that far off. It’s the largest nuclear fusion reactor in the world, and it’s set to turn on later this month.
Housed at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator looks more like a psychotic giant’s art project than the future of energy. Especially when you compare it with the reactor’s symmetrical, donut-shaped cousin, the tokamak. But stellarators and tokamaks work according to similar principles: In both cases, coiled superconductors are used to create a powerful magnetic cage, which serves to contain a gas as it’s heated to the ungodly temperatures needed for hydrogen atoms to fuse.
Continue reading “World’s Largest Fusion Reactor is About to Switch On” »
