←back to thread

New records on Wendelstein 7-X

(www.iter.org)
243 points greesil | 2 comments | 21 Jul 25 15:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.439s | source
Show context
bradleyy ◴[21 Jul 25 15:50 UTC] No.44636650[source]▶
In any future fusion power plant, a plasma with a high triple product must be maintained for long periods.

I love vague terms like "long periods". Long compared to the Planck length? Geological time? Is the advertised 43 seconds almost there or "off by 17 orders of magnitude?"

replies(5): >>44636712 #>>44636920 #>>44637043 #>>44637170 #>>44637243 #
pama ◴[21 Jul 25 16:25 UTC] No.44637043[source]▶
I agree vague language in popular press is sometimes annoying.

“Off by 17 orders of magnitude” would be off by 136 billion years, so not that much for sure. Assuming you want to be able to test the plant and or maintain it once per year, 43 seconds is less than 6 orders of magnitude off. The jump was more than a full order of magnitude compared to past records, so another handful such developments and we are there.

replies(2): >>44638663 #>>44644754 #
1. Retric ◴[21 Jul 25 18:29 UTC] No.44638663[source]▶
Even 1 hour of stability with a relatively short restart period (under 5 minutes) would be fine with a battery system assuming the rest of the power plant was cheap enough to build and operate.

Nuclear already gets taken offline for several weeks for refueling, but redundancy covers such issues.

replies(1): >>44644762 #
2. XorNot ◴[22 Jul 25 09:08 UTC] No.44644762[source]▶
Or just two reactors staggered in operation. Power grids can already coordinate on that sort of timescale.