3 ms·
A Simple Fusion Recipe
- the8472 7y agoThis is a bit light on details. Not even a link to a paper or anything.
- throwanem 7y agoSure there is. But it's styled not to look like a hyperlink, because that's a good idea? Anyway, https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.095001 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
- jessriedel 7y agoI guess it lets Nature say they always link to the papers they discuss while minimizing outbound traffic to competitors. Ugh.
- Harvesterify 7y agoThe link to the article is at the end: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.095001 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
- amelius 7y agoSadly, I'm surprised nobody patented the idea of "using natural magnets in a fusion reactor".
- FiatLuxDave 7y agoThat's probably because there is way too much prior art. We used NeFeB magnets in my fusion reactor... in 1995. I'm sure we weren't the first. The insight that Zarnstorff had wasn't that permanent magnets are strong enough to help fusion (neos aren't significantly stronger than they were a few decades ago), it was that the poloidal field twist in a stellarator could be assisted by permanent magnets, saving energy. You may be familiar with donut-shaped tokamaks. To work, a tokamak has to have a field in both the toroidal (around the donut hole) and poloidal (up through the donut hole) direction. This causes a twist in the region where the plasma is. There are a number of ways to make the poloidal field; the classic way is to run current through the plasma. A stellarator has magnets that already incorporate that twist in their magnetic field, so they don't need current in the plasma to supply it. What this paper is about is using permanent magnets to supply some of the field needed for that twist instead of using the main magnets, so you can use fewer or weaker main magnets.