Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

Re:Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendel... by DennisP on Monday November 26, 2018 @10:06PM (#18538994)

I'm not a fusion scientist so I can't really judge, but in general I'm not sure it makes sense to say "it turns out" unless you know that experiments have proven it correct. From some quick googling it appears that TAE people responded to the critique and other people thought they made some valid points; see page 4 in this paper:

http://w3fusion.ph.utexas.edu/ifs/ifsreports/919_wong.pdf

Things seem to be going pretty well for TAE, at least as far as plasma confinement goes. Whether they can get net power from boron is another question, of course. I definitely see them as a dark horse compared to the tokamak companies.

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Re:Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendel... by pfdietz on Monday November 26, 2018 @10:43PM (#18539151)

TAE has recently begun pivoting, for example trying to use their technology for cancer treatment(!). Their name change was part of this. Generally a company doesn't do something like that unless they are forced to.

TAE's response was not at all strong, IMO. And that was not the only critique.

Plasma confinement is not the issue for TAE. The problem is even with perfect confinement, their non-Maxwellian scheme doesn't work.

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