New Fusion Testbed.
Aug. 22nd, 2004 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI should preface this little message by saying that although Nuclear Physics was my first love and what I first majored in at University, its also an area where my intuitions have proven to be very wrong in the past. 20 years ago I would have bet good money that the first working fusion reactor would be some shiva-esque inertial confinement system based on spherical arrays of lasers or ion beams, while the Tokomak was a dead-end technology due to inherent magnetic-field instabilities in the design.
Well, since then inertial confinement systems have gone nowhere while tokomaks have gotten better and better, despite their inherent flaws. Now though, I've just learned about the Levitating Dipole reactor. Rather than having a large coil of magnets on the outside of a donut and trying to produce a plasma inside, they levitate the magnets at the center of a ring and produce a plasma on the outside of the magnets. From a magnetic field stability point-of-view this is waaaay better and I have a very good feeling about this avenue of research. There are *many* technical problems with doing things this way, as there is a need to keep a levitating magnet cooled to 12K while a fusion reaction is happening just inches away, but I can see a number of possible approaches to solving them. I'll be watching progress in this area with interest.
Well, since then inertial confinement systems have gone nowhere while tokomaks have gotten better and better, despite their inherent flaws. Now though, I've just learned about the Levitating Dipole reactor. Rather than having a large coil of magnets on the outside of a donut and trying to produce a plasma inside, they levitate the magnets at the center of a ring and produce a plasma on the outside of the magnets. From a magnetic field stability point-of-view this is waaaay better and I have a very good feeling about this avenue of research. There are *many* technical problems with doing things this way, as there is a need to keep a levitating magnet cooled to 12K while a fusion reaction is happening just inches away, but I can see a number of possible approaches to solving them. I'll be watching progress in this area with interest.
