...and then?
It looked pretty finished...have they tried it yet? If not, what's the hold up?
Links?
*quality stuff...let's see it in action!

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by newtboy.

Huh, so this is what the future looks like . . . I like it!

I was reading about this earlier today, looks amazing. I actually didn't know it was built yet, the article only talked about the theories behind it and the computer design.

There have been smaller examples successfully run (such as the HSX, but this is the largest/most powerful yet. It's just hoping, but here's hoping the 7-X will outshine (literally and figuratively) the results from Tokamak super-budget science.

Last I heard, they intend to create their first experimental plasma towards the end of this year, once they pass the final inspections and receive their operating permit.

By the way, the project is 100% publicly financed and run by a non-profit association of German research institutes.

Good luck to them, they'll need it. What is easy to forget with fusion is that they are still miles off reaching break even in a sustainable fashion. Moreover there are so many conflicting engineering requirements (super cooled magnets next to super heated plasma anyone?) that it isn't just a linear progression of difficulty to reaching break even, it is more like an exponential curve.

I don't think it will ever work, and with LFTR in development by the Chinese I don't think it is necessary either.

Everything's all fun and plasma until someone jokingly speaks in tongues during the high energy stress test which opens a portal and awakes an Elder God...

Wow, impressive.
But somehow this makes me think of Buckaroo Banzai before anything else :-P

As others have mentioned there are indeed still major issues to solve. But, they are slowly crawling to the answer (for some reason the US has just a "little bit" of interest in this--though if they go ahead and name their scientists as the sole awesomeness that thought how to make this a reality one day... I will truly hate my government for sure...

Hopefully, this reactor can give us some good data (and also hopefully was built with new processes across the board; again giving the scientists more data) on what's working better and what's failing either worse or @the same rate... There are about three main issues that need to be solved before we can call it "somewhat quits" (but, even after that, this would be a machine that needs a careful eye and constant monitoring).

I'm looking forward to the International Committee's Fusion Reactor in 2019~, called: ITER. It'll kind of be the "LHC" of the fusion world... They probably will figure out the issue with radiation destroying/eating away the guards/shields on the insides for the plasma.

These things are definitely awesome to see...

God, what a badass machine.
I hope it's not for naught...
I'll put my money on the National Ignition Facility though.