NEWS OF THE WEEK
HYDROGEN PLASMA CREATED CLEAN ENERGY: Wendelstein 7-X fusion
The Wendelstein 7-X creates its first hydrogen plasma. IPP
facility in Germany is up and running
W
ITH THE SWIFT push of a button, German
Chancellor Angela Merkel initiated for the first time the production of hydrogen plasma in the new Wendelstein 7-X fusion facility located at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) last week. “We want to make the source of energy of the sun and the stars usable on Earth,” said Sibylle Günter, IPP’s scientific director. The long-term goal of fusion science is to fuse the nuclei of deuterium and tritium, heavy forms of hydrogen, into helium and a neutron to produce thermal energy. Researchers at the Wendelstein 7-X facility, built over the past decade at a cost of $413 million, won’t attempt to achieve nuclear fusion, which requires temperatures higher than 100 million K to occur. Their goal is to learn how to optimally contain hydrogen plasma at 80 million K in a magnetic cage so that the extremely hot plasma does not touch the plasma chamber’s walls. Two strategies invented in the 1950s have long been
CHEMCHINA WILL BUY SYNGENTA
SYNGENTA
AGROCHEMICALS: Large Chinese chemical producer to get world’s largest agricultural chemicals firm
ChemChina has an opportunity to extend Syngenta’s seeds R&D to China.
S
YNGENTA, the world’s largest producer of ag-
ricultural chemicals, has accepted an offer to be acquired by ChemChina, one of China’s largest chemical companies, for $43.3 billion. After the planned merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont, the deal continues consolidation in the agrochemicals sector. Syngenta’s board has unanimously accepted the offer, something it did not do when Monsanto tried to acquire Syngenta last year. The firms expect to conclude the deal by year-end. Syngenta will continue to have headquarters in Switzerland. Syngenta has more than 28,000 employees and annual sales of $13.4 billion, mostly from patented chemical pesticides. It had a 15% share of the global agrochemicals market in 2014, according to analysts at Phillips McDougall. ChemChina, which is owned by the Chinese state, has agrochemical sales of more than $3 billion via its generic pesticides subsidiary Adama, much of which is the forCEN.ACS.ORG
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competing for “best design” in containing superhot plasma in a magnetic cage. The tokamak design originated in Russia; its simple doughnut shape creates a magnetic field cage, but it can optimally contain the plasma only with the help of a pulsed current and is prone to disruptions in the plasma. The stellarator design—found in the Wendelstein 7-X facility—originated in the U.S.; its complicated twistycurvy doughnut shape creates a magnetic field that can contain plasma without added current or disruptions. However, these twists are so challenging to engineer that stellarator performance has lagged behind that of tokamaks for more than half of a century, explains David Gates, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “The simple symmetry of the tokamak was an advantage. It was easier to build a good tokamak than to build a good stellarator ,” explains David Campbell, head of science and operations at ITER, a tokamak facility being built in France. ITER aims to be the first facility to output more energy from fusion than is inputted—several steps beyond Wendelstein 7-X’s goal of containing the plasma. Improvements in the stellarator design, however, have been made by supercomputers, precision engineering, and theoretical advances, making it possible for the Wendelstein 7-X to compete with similar-size tokamaks—at least in principle, Campbell says.— SARAH EVERTS
mer Makhteshim Agan Industries, an Israeli firm that ChemChina acquired in 2011. After the acquisition, Syngenta will continue to be run by its existing management team, the Swiss firm says. Four of its current board members will be part of a new 10-member Syngenta board. Syngenta and ChemChina maintain that the acquisition will lead to expansion and enhanced innovation, rather than job cuts and consolidation. “Our vision for Syngenta is all about growth,” says ChemChina Chairman Ren Jianxin. Given the professed focus on expansion and not cost-cutting, “the deal is good news for both Syngenta’s shareholders as well as its employees,” says Kamel Mellahi, a professor and China expert at England’s University of Warwick. Access to Syngenta’s leading technologies in seeds and pesticides will have a transformative effect on ChemChina, Mellahi says. “The deal is going to take ChemChina to a whole new level.” Media reports suggest the deal could lead to intellectual property and food security concerns among Western governments, including in the U.S. where Syngenta has significant business activity. Mellahi plays down intellectual property concerns but says he expects U.S. authorities to ascertain whether the deal poses any risks to national security ahead of regulatory approval. In 2015, Monsanto offered to buy Syngenta for $47 billion, but its bid was rejected. Syngenta had said the Monsanto offer “significantly undervalued the company and was fraught with execution risk.”—ALEX SCOTT
FEBRUARY 8, 2016
