That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
Germany - where politicians are sane enough to be allowed to press buttons.
German Chancellor fires hydrogen plasma with the push of a button
Angela Merkel has witnessed the first hydrogen plasma being created by the Wendelstein 7-X fusion reactor experiment as part of Germany's push to take the lead in future power generation. Chancellor Mutti, as the ex-research scientist is known by the German electorate, fired up the device – which then fired a two-megawatt …
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 21:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
Germany - where politicians are sane enough to be allowed to press buttons.
But a bit pointless because the German public will be easily stirred up by the Greens, and it can join fission reactors on the "we're scared, take it away now" list.
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 22:20 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
Well, she has a magna cum laude PhD in physics* (Dr. rer.-nat.) and isn't related to Douglas Fargo, so she's good to go re pressing buttons.
* 1986: "Untersuchung des Mechanismus von Zerfallsreaktionen mit einfachem Bindungsbruch und Berechnung ihrer Geschwindigkeitskonstanten auf der Grundlage quantenchemischer und statistischer Methoden"
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Thursday 4th February 2016 10:02 GMT DJO
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
You're right, the country has lost its quaint character since Thatcher defeated the unions. No longer are homes lit by candle-light for half of the week.
Before Thatcher it took one average salary to be able to afford to buy one average house, after Thatcher it took 4 to 5 average salaries to be able to afford one average house. The knock-on effect of house price inflation is felt throughout the economy and Thatcher was almost completely responsible for it. (She allowed Building Societies to run Estate Agencies which was previously not allowed due to the obvious conflict of interest, this caused the first rocketing of house prices)
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Thursday 4th February 2016 10:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
"Before Thatcher it took one average salary to be able to afford to buy one average house, after Thatcher it took 4 to 5 average salaries to be able to afford one average house."
Its called supply and demand. Look it up. And since labour let in 4 million immigrants who all needed somewhere to live, please explain how that helped house and rent prices?
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Thursday 4th February 2016 10:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
"We had one who was an industrial chemist and we're still suffering from the damage she caused."
FFS are people really still trotting out this lefty scapegoat? Get over it. Thatcher left power TWENTY SIX YEARS ago. We had THIRTEEN years of a Labour government who had more than enough time to sort out any issues. They didn't - they fucked the economy even more. So GTFU and stop blaming a dead woman for the Labour partys fuckups in the late 90s and 2000s.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 11:09 GMT AndrueC
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
FFS are people really still trotting out this lefty scapegoat? Get over it. Thatcher left power TWENTY SIX YEARS ago.
Exactly. It's a smokescreen. It complete hides the appalling policies of Pitt the Younger. That man should be vilified for the ongoing harm he caused this country!
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Thursday 4th February 2016 21:11 GMT x 7
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
"the appalling policies of Pitt the Younger. "
Yes, my ancestral village has a pond named after him, which he pushed the local landowner into making. That valley has never been the same again. Appalling waste of good farmland (though it used to be a good source of ice for storing food - shame the global warming kicked in a couple of hundred years ago)
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Thursday 4th February 2016 12:16 GMT Cuddles
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
"So GTFU and stop blaming a dead woman for the Labour partys fuckups in the late 90s and 2000s."
It's not an "us or them" situation. It's entirely possible to blame said dead woman for her fuckups while also blaming the following Labour government for their own, independent fuckups. And blaming subsequent Labour, Tory and coalition governments for all of theirs. Just because someone dislikes Thatcher doesn't mean they're some rabid fanboy who thinks Labour can do no wrong.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 14:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
"Just because someone dislikes Thatcher doesn't mean they're some rabid fanboy who thinks Labour can do no wrong."
True. But any changes thatcher (and major) made could have been reversed by 13 years of a labour government if they'd wanted to. They didn't. In fact they arguably made things even worse - Hospital PFIs anyone? A policy of such breathtaking stupidity that even the monster raving looneys would probably have discarded it as being too crazy.
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Friday 5th February 2016 01:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
There are those who would say it's perfectly reasonable to blame Mrs T for the mistakes of New Labour, since - it is argued by some - Blair and Brown were just continuing the Thatcherite project. Just like the current shower...
If you're a real Lefty, you know it's been quite a long time since the UK has had a genuinely left-wing government - the last one got voted out in 1951.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 11:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
"All those PPEs don't seem to result in a non-sociopathic Cabinet."
PPE was invented at Oxford to replace Greats - the study of the classics which ensured you had the best education money could buy - from the 1st century AD.
Politics - keeping our class in power
Philosophy - why it is right that we run the country
Economics - how to ensure we get all the money.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 13:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
The problem is AC, that Politics have become much more important to most readers than the odd Science article. Politics has more effect on our immediate futures. Merkel is using this announcement politically to make her look better than she really is.
There are too many people concerned about politics to contain the fervor; regardless of how so many wish to cram the genie back in the bottle and silence dissenting opinion. This is the case on almost every forum I have visited. It is not limited to the Register.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 00:58 GMT joed
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
I could you bring number of historical examples to the contrary (this in regard to sanity being particual virtue of German politicians).
BTW, when she pressed that button I bet she was hoping to execute nuclear option against EPA harassing VAG;)
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Thursday 4th February 2016 07:04 GMT Voland's right hand
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
Yesss... you know the world has gone mad when you have German, sane and politician in one sentence.
Dunno, but the first thing that came to my mind was: "Now Witness the Firepower of this fully Armed and Operational Battle Station"
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Thursday 4th February 2016 13:11 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
> Given the chaos Merkel has caused in europe in the last few months
To be fair to her, she's teetering on the usual politician seesaw: "Do the right thing" vs "get re-elected". Her's seems slightly more tilted to the "do the right thing[1]" than a lot of other politicians..
[1] albeit a "do the right thing" from a German perspective but you can't have everything..
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Thursday 4th February 2016 14:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's Bundeskanzlerin Frau Doktor Angela Merkel to you
"[1] albeit a "do the right thing" from a German perspective but you can't have everything.."
"Do the right thing" seems to translate into german as "Yet more WW2 guilt assuaging self flaggelation except this time lets whip the rest of europe as well as ourselves". I don't believe in Sins of the Father and I'm getting a bit sick of the elderly generation in europe trying to push inherited guilt onto the young. You have to be over 70 years old to have even been alive during WW2 and all the people responsible for it are long dead. Time to move on.
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 20:51 GMT ZSn
magnetic coils
A stellarator also uses 'magnetic coils to keep the plasma from burning its way out of the reaction chamber'. It's just that they aren't cylindrically symmetric the same way that a Tokamak is. The big problem with stellarators is that the 'bends' in the plasma containment vessel have to be very well designed and machined to ensure that there aren't points where there is a higher transport of the plasma across the field lines and thus a lower containment time. That said the ability to work continuously is a big plus.
Though 80 million sounds a lot, it's only about 7KeV, which isn't that much compared to what a fully functional burning plasma needs to achieve (perhaps stellarators can run lower, I'm too rusty to remember that though).
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 21:07 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: magnetic coils
Even looking at the diagram of the Stellarator it's hard to picture - no wonder it's taken until now to be able to run the models to design the fields.
And all this for the price of a couple of community catalyst catapults for a Shoreditch web design imagineering exercise.
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 20:54 GMT Destroy All Monsters
"Wendelstein 7-X"
With that kind of Perry Rhodan styled naming, this MUSS SEIN EIN success!
Did the assembled button-pushing politicians carry rayguns and wear spacesuits of zany design?
Bum icon because 1) A tear for the outrageously fascistic storytelling of my youth and 2) That photo vaguely looks like there is a homeless person in the plasma chamber
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Thursday 4th February 2016 13:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
In Brazil we got up issue 536, IIRC. Issues 200-299 were really interesting.
Sometimes I think about getting some digital versions available online (if you catch my drift) and running through Google Translate, but I think I will be so disappointed...
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 23:42 GMT fritsd
Re: re.Mutti
Not a German commentard, but let's put it this way:
If e.g. Berlusconi had been chancellor of Germany instead of Merkel during the subprime mortgage crisis, Ukraine crisis, Greece crisis and IS/refugee crisis, politicians would've been frantically pressing buttons on "a different kind" of fusion reactors by now.
Well, they'd probably have stopped by now, because there wouldn't be any left (politicians and launch buttons).
Hence Mutti. Well-deserved, in my opinion...
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Thursday 4th February 2016 11:26 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: re.Mutti
It's a bit of both: "mother knows best" and "mother hen" come to mind when thinking of her consensus-driven style of politics.
Her premiership has been characterised by her reassuring Germans that they were doing well while everywhere else was going to hell. Until recently she has studiously avoided adopting a position on any issue until the prevailing opinion in the country became clear. She has also demonstrated considerable skill in removing opponents, particularly putative alpha-males, within her own party and out-flanking the others by shamelessly adopting their positions and reversing policy if necessary. For this she has been rewarded by a population worried by change.
The wheels have started to come off recently ever since she surprisingly adopted a position on refugees and proceeded to break EU law (Dublin II). This initially suited the "mother hen" image and was wildly popular for a couple of months.
As for her record on nuclear power: once, when referring to nuclear accidents she made a comparison with baking noting that when you bake a cake not everything stays in the bowl… Of course, this was long before Fukushima…
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 21:44 GMT Camilla Smythe
Bollocks
I've been railing against the present direction of nuclear fusion for the past 30 years and the idiots have repeatedly spent the last 'it will work in 50 years' getting it completely fucking wrong.
Now the Germans join in...
Herr Ubersturmbarfuher. It ist not fusing!!!
Gott in Himmel. Gift Umbeelerdang einst HammerungMachininenBerlicktBiggerZumpf!!!!
Yetz!!! Neu Im Programme!!
Probably just as well because if Patrick Stewart turned up on my doorstep he would get his fucking egg head kicked in.
There you go folks. Planets fucked. No salvation. Go program Internet of Fucked.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 00:18 GMT cbars
Re: Bollocks
1) Your taking it a bit further than you usually do, stop it, it's weird.
2) Since when did 'old technology' become bad technology? The wheels on my car, and the car itself, are working very well. They are old technology because they work very well.
3) Tokamaks (et al) are awesome! Intense electromagnetic fields are pretty much the only way to contain the raging power of the stars. Practising containment is extremely important if you want to run a continuous reaction for 50+ years as a power station, not for safety, for durability. We just need a big enough machine, come on ITER!
For reasons why this is true, please see theoretical physics.
A picture speaks 1000 words:
http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/F3.large_.jpg
Based on that, I hope you'll see, the direction for the past 30 years has been bang on! Yay physics!
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Thursday 4th February 2016 14:48 GMT Camilla Smythe
Re: Bollocks A picture speaks 1000 words:
http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/F3.large_.jpg
That will do nicely and thank you very much.
This is the state of dysfunctional fusion research based on The Lawson Criterion. Energy, Density, Time.
So. Since 1968 the numpties have been building bigger and bigger hammers in an effort to match some dream-line related to the combined three parts of that misplaced Criterion and every time it does not work they go and build a bigger hammer.
"Wow.. Like Awesome."
"Big Science Dude!"
"Does it Work?"
"Not Yet. We need a bigger one."
"Will it work when you have a bigger one?"
"Errr... maybe. We need more Data."
"Why didn't you build a bigger one in the first place?"
"Stop asking fucking questions! Man you are oppressing me!!"
As Oprah once said...
"It's not the Size of Your Knob. It's how you Row The Boat."
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Friday 5th February 2016 07:51 GMT cbars
Re: Bollocks A picture speaks 1000 words:
@Camilla
"Thank you very much"
You're welcome.
Can you post a link to a research paper (not Arxiv) which is generally accepted to have discredited the Lawson criterion?
Otherwise, I suggest you stop judging things by your infinite wisdom, and think properly about them first. I eagerly await ITER, and then the actual power plant that will follow (if I'm still alive, it is a government project after all).
The nice thing about science is that when you're right, it doesn't fucking matter what some ignorant chump says. That applies to you as well as me, so let's just sit back, bookmark this argument, and see what the experimental physicists can (dis)prove.
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Friday 5th February 2016 16:33 GMT Camilla Smythe
Re: Bollocks A picture speaks 1000 words:
@cbars
Cheers.
Unless I write one then I cannot point you to such a paper. I should also state that I am not suggesting that Lawson is discredited... just that its thinking is not deep enough inside the box because the big hammer guys are simultaneously working on the 'three dimensions' to that box, Energy, Density, Time, because they are fixated on Lawson rather than trying to isolate and specifically control any one particular 'variable' in order to leverage a possible advantage...Just building bigger piles of wood in the expectation that things are going to spontaneously combust and drive the steam engine hung off the back of it?
Of course if I were to write such a paper and I will state all I could do is 'postulate' because I do not have the required knowledge to fully argue my case... as in... Blah, Blah, Blah and by the way here is one that is working, unlike your pieces of big hammer shit so go suck on that one. I'd be pilloried, excommunicated and burned at the stake before the status quo got back to building bigger Big Physics hammers.
Still since you appear to be interested and prepared to lend an ear... Assuming I have not misunderstood The Lawson Criterion then which is the important part of Energy, Density, Time that does not nominally involve probability and is therefore utterly, completely and thoroughly wasted by the other two according to some huge combined power loss law as identified by Lawson, and others, in their search for a 'self sustaining' reaction?
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Thursday 4th February 2016 00:34 GMT ZSn
Re: Bollocks
Not entirely sure why I'm replying but here goes:
a) fusion works, firstly thermonuclear weapons prove the general principle, and secondly they got a burn 20 years ago in JET (but JET is too small so it didn't do much apart from make the machine radioactive);
b) tokamaks are the best current bet (stellerators may be coming up from behind but at the present tokamaks are where the clever money is);
c) inertial confinement, apart from the physics, is actually mainly sunk by the economics of the design (look it up if you don't believe me);
d) it's been 50 years because governments aren't willing to spend the money when oil is so cheap (it's what sunk the effort 20 years ago), the required parameters have been known about for at least 20 years and they require a lot of money to achieve. They seem to be happier spend untold billions in wars in the middle east instead.
Perhaps you can enlighten us as the to the more sensible course of action? Colliding rose petals together in an atmosphere of aromatic oils to the sound of whale-song?
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Thursday 4th February 2016 09:24 GMT fajensen
Re: Bollocks
b) tokamaks are the best current bet (stellerators may be coming up from behind but at the present tokamaks are where the clever money is);
Disagree. Tokamaks - especially ITER is where the dumb money goes to die. I.M.O. Tokamaks are a technological rat trap. They will always be an infinitesimal amount away from "break even", performing juust well enough to suck in money but never actually delivering. Back in the day, ITER was "the biz", the Germans disagreed and built Wendelstein (which I and many others believed would never work) and now Wendelstein has gone and lapped ITER.
To really move forward it is often necessary to take a step back in finances, performance, whatever - we see this in computing, the top-of-the-range, best performance per dollar kit, is ruined by the worse (on all parameters), yet more adaptable technologies that can be evolved.
d) Controlled fusion is really hard to do. Pouring money on it does not really change this (much) unless one goes "Full-On Apollo" on the problem - Which I do think that we should, actually, both for our own and for the planets sake. Every dollar spent on oil is a direct donation to terrorism and the destruction of the ecosystem.
An Apollo-style program, several alternative paths - because this is hard and therefore will take real time and effort - is what we should do.
We can still use ITER, but ITER should be just one of many bets made.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 13:51 GMT ZSn
Re: Bollocks
@ fajensen
No, you're wrong there. They've been a long way from break even and as I've said several times before the parameters required to break even have been known about for at least 20 years. If they built it big enough it would (probably) work. That would cost a lot of money and governments have pointless wars that they prefer to finance. The big problem with development has always been the American senate for some reason. They've done their best to scupper any international agreement for ITER. The usual joke is that they don't see the point when oil is so cheap (and it is cheap compared to the damage that it does).
In case you don't know there are many different approaches taken to fusion, ITER is the biggest and best funded precisely because it is the most promising. For example the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik runs Wendelstein and a fairly large tokamak ASDEX. There is MAST in Culham and various other piecemeal projects. There is also inertial confinement, but again the usual joke is that this is in fact a way to get around the nuclear test ban treaty.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 15:08 GMT Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Re: tokamaks
"If they built it big enough it would (probably) work. That would cost a lot of money and governments have pointless wars that they prefer to finance."
Ah, they're just following the genie from this old story:
A Princeton plasma physicist is at the beach when he discovers an ancient looking oil lantern sticking out of the sand. He rubs the sand off with a towel and a genie pops out. The genie offers to grant him one wish. The physicist retrieves a map of the world from his car an circles the Middle East and tells the genie, 'I wish you to bring peace in this region'.
After 10 long minutes of deliberation, the genie replies, 'Gee, there are lots of problems there with Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, and all those other places. This is awfully embarrassing. I've never had to do this before, but I'm just going to have to ask you for another wish. This one is just too much for me'.
Taken aback, the physicist thinks a bit and asks, 'I wish that the Princeton tokamak would achieve scientific fusion energy break-even.
After another deliberation the genie asks, 'Could I see that map again?'
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Thursday 4th February 2016 16:22 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Bollocks
@ZSn
But Tokamaks aren't going to be the soln for continual power generation while Stellarators might be.
So is ITER a necessary engineering exercise to learn practical details or is it a giant white elephant - like a Victorian program to develop kevlar sails so tea clippers can keep beating steam ships ?
Frankly given the politics I'm amazed ITER has done anything at all. The plan was for a bunch of countries that aren't quite at war with each other to build the highest tech bit of nuclear physics on the planet. But instead of putting money into a design they each build the bit that their govt/industry feels like. So the cool bits with industrial applications are built by multiple countries all building the same part. Some bits nobody wants to build because they want it to be secret or would take years of R&D and have no other uses.
Then you try and assemble the whole thing in France, with French labor laws and to French nuclear safety inspection standards.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 02:25 GMT x 7
"a lifetime of a quarter of a second"
really useful, yeah
fifty or so years of fusion research and the best we can do is a quarter of a second?
so who's taking the piss? This is never going to work
You'd stand more chance of something useful by taking another look at Fleishmann and Pon's theories
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Thursday 4th February 2016 08:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
"a lifetime of a quarter of a second"
really useful, yeah
fifty or so years of fusion research and the best we can do is a quarter of a second?
so who's taking the piss? This is never going to work
You'd stand more chance of something useful by taking another look at Fleishmann and Pon's theories
You're just pissed because they got your name backwards in the naming, but yes, the duration suggests it has been designed by smartphone manufacturers :)
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Thursday 4th February 2016 02:32 GMT JeffyPoooh
How do they plan to get the heat out?
A comment about fusion power and plumbing. Perhaps aimed more at L-M than anyone...
At some point they're going to need gawdawful big pipes carrying away hot medium. Fusion appears to be a very high power density scheme. But there's no point making a gigawatt matchbox-sized device (<- trying to make the point clear), nor (this is for you Lockheed-Martin) a 100MW fusion reactor that "...fits on the back of a truck..."
If it's near gigawatt class, then it needs to be the size of a large building just to have space to interface to the heat-engine plumbing. Unless they plan to use some exotic media like gaseous tungsten in one-inch plumbing, LOL. Not to mention the cold side cooling towers, turbines, generators, transformers, switch yard, offices, cafeteria, parking lot, guard house.
Lockheed-Martin must be envisioning a pretty big truck.
I've not seen any evidence that they (anyone) are working on a fusion concept with a power/volume ratio scale that's practical in terms of allowing room for the necessary plumbing to shift the energy flux out towards the steam turbines.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 09:02 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Re: How do they plan to get the heat out?
You forgot the gift shop... where would you buy the t-shirts?
Maybe Lockheed-Martin's truck is something like a land-based aircraft carrier.
On a more serious note, I guess they have given the plumbing some thought already*, but will really get into it when they can sustain reactions lasting longer than fractions of seconds.
*Maybe not the physicists, but definitely the engineers building the thing.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 14:21 GMT annodomini2
Re: How do they plan to get the heat out?
@Zsn, nope, NBI is used to heat the plasma inside the reactor.
The neutrons from the reaction exit the system through the reactor walls and are intended to be used to heat water, probably heavy water, to produce steam and conventional generation takes place.
Direct generation cannot be done with a Tokamak or a Stellarator, it requires an Aneutronic reaction to do direct generation. Neither of these are capable of reaching the required temperatures and pressures for Aneutronic Fusion.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 08:07 GMT John Smith 19
Is pulse operation a design "feature" of Tokamaks or just what you can do so far?
Enquiring minds.
If the exact details of the Stellarator path are critical to its function I'm not surprised it didn't work in the 1960's.
Wheather it's "better" will remain to be seen.
It's certainly cheaper than ITER.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 16:27 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Is pulse operation a design "feature" of Tokamaks or just what you can do so far?
No it's a core feature. It's like a big transformer it can only work while the field is changing.
To make it worse the more power you need to contain the faster you need to raise the field so you can make it cycle on-off over hours at low power but minutes at GW powers.
Even worse-worse, like a transformer you go through zero field switching between +/- and at that point there is no field to hold the plasma which then hits the walls and melts your machine. So you need to dump the plasma and start again every half cycle.
The big advantage of the stellarator is that the plasma generates it's own permanent containment field, the drawback is that you have an amazingly complex job to control it.
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Thursday 4th February 2016 09:00 GMT Fred Flintstone
Re: Igor, Raise ze lighnink rod
I agree, there is a sorry absence of drama and machines that do "ping".
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Thursday 4th February 2016 10:30 GMT Richard Boyce
Be afraid
I have noted that this discussion involving very long german words has attracted some posters with very long user names without even the occassional upper case letter to assist the reader.
This appears to be strong evidence that disgustedoftunbridgewells and allthecoolshortnamesweretaken are sleeper agents among us just waiting for the day when this ubertechnology will make germans proud again.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
