It’s a newly proposed fusion reactor prototype. It’s a stellerator type reactor. Together with the Tokamak type reactor these two are the currently most promising types to achieve fusion and generate more energy than they take to operate. While the tokamakak type looks more symmetrical to the human eye the stellerator types have adopted very weird looking shapes where the symmetries are more hidden. The pictures are from this paper by mostly people from the institute who created the to date biggest stellerator type fusion generator Wendelstein 7-x. Their proposed prototype ‘Stelaris’ is a lot bigger than the 7-x.
Bonus (with little context):
And heres a shematic view oft how it would look like from outside. Just like a donut.
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I decided to read up on it since it looks a bit mental but once you know why it makes a lot of sense.
Plasma is charged and needs to be contained with magnets because it’ll melt anything it touches.
To use the magnets uniformly on a donut shaped cloud of particles will cause the particles drift and hit the wall because the donut has particles traveling short distences close to the donut hole and long on the rim. The particle will eventually drift into the wall and destroy the reactor.
So fuck it, squash the donut and twist it around and now all of parts of a cross section traveling around the donut are traveling equally long distance.
Ions don’t move along field lines they want to spiral around them that’s why. The shape of the magnetic containment field is actually quite simple: Take a donut, squish it a bit, cut it open, twist one end a couple of times and glue it up again. Five times in this case, seems to be a popular choice. It’s the coils generating that field where the geometry gets Lovecraftian.
This is the Proxima Fusion stuff, they’re planning on running the first surplus energy reactor early 30s and commercialise in that decade, the whole thing is designed for mass production with economics (build cost vs. maintenance vs. electricity price etc) in mind from the get-go. And yes they’ll pull it off it’s a spinoff of the Max Planck institute, not some garage tinkerers or VC fund techbros.
Interesting. Their proposed stelaris reactor only has four twists in it though if I interpret the Plasma’s shape as shown in their paper correctly.
It could be due to the generators much larger size but that’s just a hobbyist’s guesswork. Here a comparison of the height of one coil to other reactors and a human:
I’m not sure yet how much they are exaggerating with their capabilities and the reactors feasibility since I’m not a physicists and my only trust towards them stems from them working with the Max plank institute. But I hope it’s solid work. I’m looking forward to the reactions from other physicists to the plan though.
Yeah I’m blind that’s four. Having fewer twists means more coils have the same shape so it’s going to be cheaper to build but of course that’s just one dimension of a massive, massive, design space. That’s practically all they’ve been working on since Wendelstein turned on and exceeded everyone’s expectations by behaving exactly as predicted. Wouldn’t make sense to build a thing that gets Q > 1 but can’t compete with at least fossil fuels, in fact that’d be rather embarrassing.
Oh that’s a good explanation for four twists. It sounds pretty likely that this was factored into the design.
tag yourself i’m the homogenized breeding blanket
Very interesting
If you need me, I’ll be in my homogenized breeding blanket.
Some days you just need neutrons to smash you hard enough to produce tritium.
I’m sure it’s somebody’s fetish.
Make sure you wear protection of you don’t plan to have tritiums too young
Don’t forget to say no homo.
If you need me, I’ll be in my
homogenized breeding blanket.
While I find the fact that the pics are being hosted on lemmynsfw.com hilarious, they are having the unfortunate effect of being blocked by the office firewall 😅
I thought stellarators were older than tokamaks.
The largest stellerator currently operating in the US is. HSX at UW-Madison. The copper magnet coils had to be explosively formed. The coils were delivered one at a time. At one point one was stolen off the loading dock. This caused a lot of panic, as the budget was spent. There was no way to replace the stolen coil.
Something like a day later the sheriff called the university asking the if they were missing a hunk of copper. The thieves took the coil to a scrap yard for scrap value. The yard figured there was no way this bonkers shaped thing wasn’t made to a particular purpose so they played along long enough to call the cops to find the rightful owner.
It’s worth recognizing stellerators since HSX have all been periodic, that is every coil isn’t unique. The designs used to be even more insane.
Damn amateur methhead copper thieves. Don’t they know the first rule of something like that is to break into into unrecognizable pieces or melt it down prior to taking it to the scrap yard?!#
I mean, we’re dealing with motherfucking fusion here. I’m surprised they aren’t talking about physical reactor parts that exist only in the 42nd dimension while orbiting a half a light year from Sag A*.
Before I read the text I thought this was going to be about cellular biology
