'Star in a Jar' Fusion Reactor Works and Promises Infinite Energy

[James Wilkinson Sword]

[Tim Streater]

It doesn't seem to say that fusion has been achieved, only that plasma has been generated and confined. Neither does it say that any planned fusion generates more energy than it takes to run the thing, nor how the energy surplus, if any, might be extracted.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Well it sounds like they've made a big step forwards.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That's the whole point of press releases.

Old design, been mucking with it for years. need more cash.

Goofle 'stellarator'

[James Wilkinson Sword]

You probably thought we'd never invent the computer.

[dennis]

People were making hydrogen plasmas when I was at uni, in the basement of the physics building. They were containing them in magnetic bottles too.

What is this new thing you think they have done?

[Jeff Layman]

+1

See also Tokamak and Joint European Torus. Every year or two we get a press release that "we are very close to a practical energy device". And that's how it's been for the last 50 years or so. It would be interesting to know how much in total has been expended on fusion research during that time.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Go tell them that you've seen it before.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Might aswell research it you silly luddite.

[Tim Streater]

And I've got a nice portfolio of bridges you might like to look at. All going cheap.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear...

[Tim Streater]

Look who is this James Wilkinson Sword dweeb? And why doesn't he just fusion off?

[The Natural Philosopher]

They got $7.5m from the US government, who have obviously also joined the EU, and spent it on a press release.

And Wanker Wilkinson fell for it.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Stop living in the past.

[Chris Hogg]

+1

Designs for fusion reactors have been around for several decades, from ZETA in 1957, then JET, ITER etc. IIRC the later versions of JET were claimed to have achieved fusion and the Wiki entry says it generated

16MW of fusion power in 1997.

Interesting note about the momentary peak power requirement for JET being 1000MW, and as they can only draw 575MW from the grid, they have to supplement that with a couple of massive 775-ton flywheel generators, which between them can produce 800MW, but briefly. Puts the suggestions of flywheel storage of electricity on the Grid into perspective.

AIUI the focus is now on ITER, under construction in the south of France.

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

Stop feeding this pillock. With no food he will just wither up and die. When dead, the nation will save much dole money.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Shut up, you still use windows XP. Fusion probably looks like magic to you.

[Brian Gaff]

Yes been here before back in when was it, 1956 oor so, the Russian Exhibition in London showed us magnetic confinement systems that appeared to generate fusion. the snag was that it was for such a tiny fraction of a second that it was hardly of much use and the energy input was huge compared with output, and of course actually getting at the output energy caused lots of issues as materials had not been made that could be used near such a hot thing. However as has been the case for many years since, it was said that Fusion power from seawater was less than 10 years away. Ahem... OK it might a lot better now than then but the same fundamental issues of scale and heat and keeping it going seem to still be the problem. Brian

[Huge]

[24 lines snipped]

Not enough.

[Huge]

He's a nym-shifting troll, probably Peter Hucker. Just killfile him and be done with it.