Joining the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator project in Greifswald, Germany, affords the US the opportunity to participate in a premier fusion facility. The project aims to prove that a stellarator could perform as a reactor and generate energy.
The move also fits with the US Department of Energy’s redirection of fusion plasma research to science relevant to ITER, the international fusion test reactor under construction in France. Accordingly, DOE has canceled some small, non-tokamak experiments. Edmund Synakowski, DOE’s Office of Science associate director for fusion energy sciences, describes the shift as going away from “exploring such alternative configurations for their own sake” to research that “can contribute to our understanding and optimizing the tokamak configuration and configurations closely related to it.”
Slated to start experiments in 2015, the W7-X will operate in a steady-state mode, confining a fusion plasma for 30 minutes at a stretch. Stellarators, like tokamaks, rely on...
