Fusion reactor designed in hell makes its debut

Germany Prepares to Power Up a Revolutionary Nuclear Fusion Machine

• By EpicTimes Nov 02, 2015

For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion. And they’re still dreaming.
But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change. Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute completed the world’s largest nuclear fusion machine of its kind, called a stellarator.
They call this 52-foot wide machine the W7-X. And following more than a year of tests, engineers are finally ready to fire up the $1.1 billion machine for the first time, and it could happen before the end of this month, Science reported.
Known in the plasma physics community as the ‘black horse’ of nuclear fusion reactors, stellarators are notoriously difficult to build. This video below demonstrates the construction of W7-X, which took 19 years to complete:
The key to a successful nuclear reactor of any kind is to generate, confine, and control a blob of super-heated matter, called a plasma — a gas that has reached temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit).
At these blazing temperatures, the electrons are ripped from their atoms, forming what are called ions. Under these extreme conditions, the repulsive forces, which normally make ions bounce off each other like bumper cars, are overcome.
Consequently when the ions collide, they fuse together, generating energy in the process, and you have what is called nuclear fusion. This is the process that has been fuelling our sun for about 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for another estimated 4 billion years.
Read the full story at sciencealert.com.