[mpweiher]

The thing is: the complexity of the device translates into simplicity of the plasma. And vice versa.

Tokamaks are nigh impossible to control.

Stellarators, if you can build them, just hum along.

And Wendelstein-7X proved that, though tricky, we can build them. Oh, and that the humming-along part is actually true.

Last I checked, the maximum time for a Tokamak is 30s so far, Wendelstein has already achieved 8 minutes and they're shooting for 30 minutes.

[namuol]

What’s the big trade off then? As I understand it there’s more funding in tokamak research.

[mpweiher]

As I wrote: the tradeoff is the complexity of the device.

I once listened to a fairly long podcast on the history of Wendelstein-7X, and apparently the mathematical/computational modelling required to figure out a decently optimized stellarator simply couldn't be done when the first ones were built, so they were very inefficient and easily beaten by the Tokamaks, and so interest and funding understandably shifted.

That changed when compute became much cheaper, and apparently some researchers created software models that they could run on their PCs and the late 80s, maybe early 90s. This was largely ignored for quite a while, as all the focus was on Tokamaks, for example JET and later ITER.

Having cracked what to build, and somehow gotten funding, the problem was then actually building it. Very, very challenging, and it did take a lot longer to build than even initially planned, and it wasn't clear that they would succeed in building it. But they did.

And ever since then, it's been humming along nicely.

[pests]

This might be a clue from Wikipedia -

The release of information on the USSR's [better performing] tokamak design in 1968 indicated a leap in performance. After great debate within the US industry, PPPL converted the Model C stellarator to the Symmetrical Tokamak (ST) as a way to confirm or deny these results. ST confirmed them, and large-scale work on the stellarator concept ended in the US as the tokamak got most of the attention for the next two decades.