WNN reports that after more than a year of technical preparations and tests, the German Wendelstein 7-X stellarator has produced its first helium plasma. Assembly of the the largest stellarator-type fusion device, at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany, began in April 2005 and was completed in April 2014. The operational preparations have been under way ever since.
Each technical system, the vacuum in the vessels, the cooling system, the superconducting coils and the magnetic field they produce, the control system, as well as the heating devices and measuring systems, has been tested in turn.
On 10 December, 2015, the operating team in the control room started up the magnetic field and initiated the computer-operated experiment control system. It fed around one milligram of helium gas into the evacuated plasma vessel and switched on the microwave heating for a short 1.3 MW pulse. The first plasma could be observed by the installed cameras and measuring devices.
The first plasma in the machine had a duration of one-tenth of a second and achieved a temperature of around one million degrees Celsius. The next task will be to extend the duration of the plasma discharges and to investigate the best method of producing and heating helium plasmas using microwaves.
Wendelstein is a stellarator fusion reactor, different to a tokamak fusion reactor such as the Joint European Torus in the UK or the Iter device under construction in France. A tokamak is based on a uniform toroid shape, whereas a stellarator twists that shape in a figure-8. This gets around the problems tokamaks face when magnetic coils confining the plasma are necessarily less dense on the outside of the toroidal ring.
Some Euo370 million ($408 million) has been invested in the Wendelstein 7-X project to date, with funding from European federal and state governments and the European Union.
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