Reply To: Energy Policy in Chile – Economist Article

[markus7]

vansig wrote: Seems to me, that the only way to make all the alphas exit in the thrust direction is to have extremely strong magnetic fields. As far as i know, only DPF does this.

The difference of course is that these potentially gigagauss fields are DPF’s astonishing, stupendous, mind blowing, game changing trick. They are not a detail.

I don’t yet understand how DPF’s clever trick is being done. It is strange to think of the plasma as being inherently self organizing in its ability to convert an almost blind input of energy into the forces needed to compress a plasma sufficiently for fusion to occur.

That is really cool.

Maybe with a lot of work I will understand it one day.

But as of now, it is so mysterious that I wonder things like “What is special about the present general layout (besides it being the one that has been historically developed)? Maybe very different configurations would even better exploit these same natural plasma instabilities.”