4 ms·

I believe that when I see it. It would be cool if that works, but what I know of the physics that are involved stands against that.

galangalalgol 7y ago
agreed, but they do get to discard the constraint of needing to make money on the energy at market rates. I'm guessing this will go on some eternally loitering aircraft like the nb36 but without the need for the 3 tons of shielding that made it unviable. or maybe that is just me wishing. probably will power haliburton contractor cities in the middle East that were a couple miles outside the existing grid so they "need" a billion dollar generator
- gmueckl 7y ago
  A fusion reactor that is operating needs shielding against neutron radiation much the same as a fission reactor does. So a fusion reactor on a manned plane still has the same mass issue even if it were compact enough to fit.
garmaine 7y ago
The physics are discussed at the bottom of the article. There's an inherent 20x efficiency improvement in containment pressure over Tokamak designs.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  The quite in the article isn't particularly helpful. Thisnis one of the cherry-picked quotes that journalists love to use that sound imagimative and colorful, but explain exactly nothing. So the field has a self-refulating field containment in the radial direction. This was never a particularly crtitical issue. The issue is building non-leaking mirrors at the end caps where the field needs to separate from the confinement to loop back on itself. You can only shape field gradients there so that they form a potential that particles on escape trajectories have to either overcome or be reflected by. I forgot the exact details, but the issues is that electrons are harder to confine and they gradually build up an electric field that attracts the protons and thus counters the mirror gradient of the magnetic field.

4 ms·

I believe that when I see it. It would be cool if that works, but what I know of the physics that are involved stands against that.

by gmueckl 7y ago

galangalalgol 7y ago
agreed, but they do get to discard the constraint of needing to make money on the energy at market rates. I'm guessing this will go on some eternally loitering aircraft like the nb36 but without the need for the 3 tons of shielding that made it unviable. or maybe that is just me wishing. probably will power haliburton contractor cities in the middle East that were a couple miles outside the existing grid so they "need" a billion dollar generator
- gmueckl 7y ago
  A fusion reactor that is operating needs shielding against neutron radiation much the same as a fission reactor does. So a fusion reactor on a manned plane still has the same mass issue even if it were compact enough to fit.
garmaine 7y ago
The physics are discussed at the bottom of the article. There's an inherent 20x efficiency improvement in containment pressure over Tokamak designs.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  The quite in the article isn't particularly helpful. Thisnis one of the cherry-picked quotes that journalists love to use that sound imagimative and colorful, but explain exactly nothing. So the field has a self-refulating field containment in the radial direction. This was never a particularly crtitical issue. The issue is building non-leaking mirrors at the end caps where the field needs to separate from the confinement to loop back on itself. You can only shape field gradients there so that they form a potential that particles on escape trajectories have to either overcome or be reflected by. I forgot the exact details, but the issues is that electrons are harder to confine and they gradually build up an electric field that attracts the protons and thus counters the mirror gradient of the magnetic field.