Fusion Stellarator Wendelstein 7-X Fires Up for Real
Today the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, at a ceremony at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma physics in Greifswald in Germany, pressed a button that caused a two-megawatt pulse of microwave radiation to heat hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees for a quarter of a second.
No, she was not setting off some new kind of hydrogen bomb. She was inaguriating the fusion reactor Wendelstein 7-X, the world’s largest stellarator, by generating its first hydrogen plasma.
Completed in April 2014 the toroidal reactor with its complicated magnetic field is viewed by many as a serious competitor to tokamak-style fusion reactors, such as ITER. One of the advantages of a stellarator is that nuclear fusion reactions can take place continuously, while a tokamak operates in a pulsed mode, making it much less efficient as an energy source.
More: Fusion Stellarator Wendelstein 7-x Fires Up for Real - IEEE Spectrum