Reply To: New Focus Fusion myspace.

[Aeronaut]

jamesr wrote: They quote a plasma beta (the ratio of pressure over magnetic pressure) as >7 which is very good, and is a measure of how strong (ie big & expensive) a magnet you need to confine the plasma. This compares to 0.02 for some tokamaks & upto 0.5 for spherical tokamaks respectively. This is encouraging as you can confine the plasma at a much higher density in a cheaper machine.

Also, although the temperature they achieve is only 0.5keV, the electron temperature is 1/4.5 of the ion temperature, which is also promising.

After the two ‘smoke rings’ or compact toroids (CT) in their language, are fired at each other they form a ~1m wide blob of plasma with a peak density of 10^20/m^3 after around 40us, which is kept stable for around 1ms before instabilities set in, and the confinement is lost.

They say further heating mechanisms could be added such as neutral beam injectors (NBI), but I’m not sure this would maintain the favourable ion/electron temperature ratio needed for pB11 fusion

So that’s a pulsed design, also? If successful, will the blob be able to generate aneutronic fusion products for the entire ~mS of stable confinement?