AstroBax I completely agree with you!

I'm finding it really strange how under-reported this breakthrough was. Ask anyone, they've probably not heard about it.

Who cares about real achievements when there's Hollywood scandals and US politics to worry about /sarcasm

People don't care, as long as their home is powered by some sort of power source. I'd say there is only a very very limited amount of people who is interested in anything that is beyond the reach of their hands or mental capabilities. Just compare the views of "this" to any video on the "worlds largest archive of nothing" - tells all about humanity.

It’s 2020 and this video only has 88k views

+izzad ibrahim Not quite more historic, but pretty good.

A Super Computer made this design possible... So no; btw that's only one of many roles computers may have had here

I don't see much advance during the last 50 years. They had longer stable plasmas in Tokamaks half a century ago.

This was just the initial test run -as they already said. This system is far more complex and also can maintain the plasma much longer than any Tokamak.

Is this one of the steps towards commercially viable energy production via fusion?

+Tyler Nelson Well. For the people that we know about fusion, this is only a small step in a research program, over a huge roadmap to bring fusion energy to get real net energy and, even more difficult, economically reasonable. W 7-X reactor is only a research model to test the advantages of this alternative configuration.

I understand that. But the fact that they even got it to run for 1/10th of a second is giant.

For people who REALLY know about fusion technology nothing about Wendelstein is a small step at all!

Most of viewers here are ones who knew about WS7X for a while, and follow up to see the results. The YT scientific creators, media, and jounralists are responsible for broadcasting and publishing such outstanding feat. Yet here we are.

+the deeliciousplum I didn't even know this project even existed until today. It's amazing! :)

I think we do need to temper our enthusiasm for "boundless energy for everyone". As it stands, greenhouse issues aside, the practice of individuals converting energy to the infra-red may or may not be influencing global temperatures (I think it does because even if we stand next to a volcano or firestorm and release heat, that's 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 heat into the system and there's nothing to say it's not all cumulative) but if every individual was given free licence to release thousands of times more energy, we might accelerate things even further beyond our control.

But please don't get me wrong. I'm a massive fan of any and all efforts towards fusion energy. It's one of our only hopes to deal with that "heat blanket" of CO2 and very soon, CH4 that the majority would choose to ignore rather than make changes.

+TheTruthQuest123 ... in terms of no longer having to rely on fossil fuels for energy generation...

+TheTruthQuest123 I think he meant 'saving the world' from an environmental perspective

+Nikolaus Heinz Well... You couldn't really achieve a temperature to -296 Celsius he must have said wrong?? since the coldest possible is -273 Celsius?

+Nikolaus Heinz He misspoke. I'm not sure what he meant to say, but -273.15 is the coldest temperature possible, though we have never been able to reach it.

Chill! I know that his intention was to say -269°C. That's why i wrote "incredibly cold"

+Nikolaus Heinz I think there was some difficulty picking the right numbers in English, that's below absolute zero and absolutely impossible! ;) 3 kelvin sounds more accurate that one of the guys said (around -270C) Either way, awesome that this is working and going to be sick if we can get more energy out of it :)

+Nikolaus Heinz yeah it's really incredibly cold. Even cooler than possible.

+DeJayHank Yeah, he misspoke. It's -269!C

+DeJayHank Hehe, yes. I guess he meant -269°C. In german you say 'two hundret-nine-and-sixty', which must have tripped him up.

+Sarge Rho yeah in german we say the numbers convered twohundret-nine-sixty, happens often :)

+kurtilein3 I'm guessing as they are German is why their accents are heavy. We should be thankful they are speaking our language so more people can understand as us English speakers are very ignorant about learning other languages.

Yes but we should try to speak more English.. xD

+Richard Rothery Jet is investigating hydrogen plasmas which Wendelstein 7-X will do next year.

+Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik I heard it's already going to be tested in January/February. I'm no expert, but if that's also a success, doesn't it do pretty much exactly what the nuclear fusion power plant is supposed to do? Which seems strange (but if true, awfully cool), because you keep reading about how that's going to be decades away.

Please tell me , guys , what is the difference between hydrogen plasma and helium plasma? Isn't all plasma just a mashup of neutrons , protons and electrons? Or does the ratio of elementary particles define the plasma?

+Richard Rothery True. Korea has achieved 100 million K 6 years ago. The leaders are China(EAST) and Korea(K-STAR).They have reached 200 and 50 seconds already,respectively.

see www.ipp.mpg.de/4828222/01_20

+PrestigeFlow -269, not -296 :P

+PrestigeFlow Translation error. You are exactly correct, -273,15 (-273.15 in the Imperial System) Celsius is 0 Kelvin. He meant to say "two-hundred nine and sixty", which means 269.

+ActivexRecon Wendelstein 7-X is a fusion reactor core of the "stellarator" type. Here they just confirmed the first succesful plasma injection and heat-up with helium. The real business will start next year and will be done with hydrogen instead, since hydrogen is the best fusion fuel candidate (with some specific isotopes). This is particularly interesting, because the stellarator-design is somewhat better suited to serious energy production than tokamak-type, which is the better known and more researched type. Stellarators by design are not altering current machines and should be able to sustain far longer fusion-burn events. Tokamaks must do a regular magnetic field reconfiguration and while this could in theory be made really fast, it will halt the fusion process. Stellarators however do not require this, and could in theory run for hours on end between cycles. Also plasma containment should be easier with stellarators. Their downside is that they are horrendously difficult to design and build, which should be evident if you look at some 3D models of the magnets.

+ILA With a camera, obviously. The interior of the stellarator is almost a vacuum, so the huge temperature isn't actually all that big of a deal.

This machine can sustain controlled nuclear fusion. You might know nuclear fission from conventional nuclear power plants. This here is nuclear fusion, which produces enormousls high temperatures and has a much higher energy output. Nuclear fusion is the process that takes place in the sun. Nice side-effect: it only produces insignificant amounts of nuclear waste with low radiation. If this thing works and will be developed to a large scale it will be THE clean energy source.

You need to be able to prove you can achieve plasma producing temperatures before you "jack things up" (to over 100 million degrees) to produce fusion (force isotopes of hydrogen together, thereby releasing energy). I suppose it's akin to walking before you can run.

From their website, it's -269c or 4K. Pretty chilly!

@@IanMaddox English is difficult for germans.. xD

+Jonathan Yep, and he misspoke, it's -269°C.

+Jonathan two hundred nine and sixty, he meant to say.

+edward stables It was a mistranslation from german as they would have said "two hundred and nine sixty".

+reinux -269, not 96.

+reinux he meant to say "negative two hundred nine and sixty", translating to "two hundred and sixty nine". On another note, you can have negative temperature because temperature is simply particles wanting to repel each other, and so bouncing away from each other, or even in the Bose-Einstein condensate, coming together as a sort-of wave. If we managed to make particles attract and so within the set of particles make the particles seem to have entropy in the backwards direction - which we HAVE done - then there would be negative kelvin temperatures. Of course, this seems to defy the laws of thermodynamics, but it does not, because the thing containing the system has to put in tremendous energy (we did it using lasers and magnetic fields). Long story short, negative Kelvin means heat travels from low heat to high heat (instead of normal high to low).

Paul Ngo I never knew that. That's awesome. Thanks.

now the flight begins

Parts of the control systems are made by Siemens. Most likely they also delivered parts of the high energy electronics. More important is that Siemens' medical division is trying to learn from the metallurgy achievements made in these developments to improve technologies for next generation diagnostic systems.

+enticed2zeitgeist 1 million degrees is not cold ;)

So why is this a break through?

+enticed2zeitgeist Not quite. We haven't really even made a working model, let alone a demonstration.

No, I don't think 1,000,000,000 degrees k is cold

+enticed2zeitgeist because this is a different possibly more viable way of performing nuclear fusion, and demonstrates new ways to manipulate plazma

+Luís R (Junk bin technician) How it would likely work is that the electricity generated from a reactor like this would feed a grid system, the amount of electricity from the small amount of fuel (deuterium, helium 3, etc.) would produce a huge volume of energy making it cheap enough to use that electricity to produce hydrogen for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. A fusion reactor model small enough for a car likely won't exist in the next 100 years or more, if ever. However it does produce immense amount of energy per volume of fuel, it's carbon neutral, and no radioactive waste products. Aviation fuel could also be produced using these power plants at cheaper than current fuel prices via electrolysis, rather than just splitting H2O into H2 and O, you would add carbon chains to the hydrogen to make a safer less volatile hydro-carbon chain, like jet fuel is today, only that it would be carbon neutral, and the same cost, most likely even cheaper because of the abundance of the fuel and the amount of energy from the fuel.

+ 1 IMHO, China will build the first fusion power plant. In China a huge progress in fusion energy in recent years.

xxwzaebd The Chinese fusion reactor was finished almost a decade ago. Certainly a great success. Will see what the W7-X can do in a few years. The W7-X can theoretically operate continously.

Nope, that's all wrong. This was just the initial test run in the video, of course. This is a Stellarator, which is expected to maintain much longer plasma times than Tokamaks. Plus Korea and China only built the far simpler Tokamak systems. They aren't even close to have something like this. The Wendelstein in this video belongs to the Max Planck institute. They also have built several Tokamak reactors (ASDEX) for decades. They even run ASDEX UPGRADE simultaneously in Garching. Also there has been another Tokamak demonstrator in Jülich, Germany (TEXTOR) since the '70s. But like I said, Tokamak is the much simpler technology. We're talking about the much more complex and advanced Stellarator here. And how is having a lot of nuclear power plants an achievement? Fission technology hasn't made any significant progress since the '80s. The only difference is today they usually add more redundant cooling circuits and have a ceramic core catcher underneath (about 500m $). One of the most advanced conventional fission systems worldwide, the EPR (also built under licence in China) is distinctly based on the German '80's "Konvoi" reactors. But as I said: nothing to be proud of. Even France will lower it's dependency of nuclear power in the future. Conventional nuclear power is viewed antiquated in science and is definitely no indicator of advanced technology.

You are seing THIS machine and the only thing than crosses your mind is the german accent? Really?