Reply To: Fusion Oil

[Lerner]

You are right Brian—shorting out the coil can be a problem, But it is not shorting it to the plasma—we can have a ceramic insulator around it, and the magnetic fields that induce the current will penetrate the insulator. But the plasma itself could carry the return current—the electrons moving in the same direction as the ions. We have to make sure that this return current has higher resistivity than the coil and moves outside the coil. That could involve manipulating the plasma density by putting a magnetic mirror at the entrance to the drift tube. Since the background plasma in the chamber is not very hot, it is much easier to control than fusion plasma.