If you need me, I'll be in my homogenized breeding blanket.

I mean, we’re dealing with motherfucking fusion here. I’m surprised they aren’t talking about physical reactor parts that exist only in the 42nd dimension while orbiting a half a light year from Sag A*.

The largest stellerator currently operating in the US is. HSX at UW-Madison. The copper magnet coils had to be explosively formed. The coils were delivered one at a time. At one point one was stolen off the loading dock. This caused a lot of panic, as the budget was spent. There was no way to replace the stolen coil.

Something like a day later the sheriff called the university asking the if they were missing a hunk of copper. The thieves took the coil to a scrap yard for scrap value. The yard figured there was no way this bonkers shaped thing wasn't made to a particular purpose so they played along long enough to call the cops to find the rightful owner.

It's worth recognizing stellerators since HSX have all been periodic, that is every coil isn't unique. The designs used to be even more insane.

While I find the fact that the pics are being hosted on lemmynsfw.com hilarious, they are having the unfortunate effect of being blocked by the office firewall 😅

Before I read the text I thought this was going to be about cellular biology

I decided to read up on it since it looks a bit mental but once you know why it makes a lot of sense.

Plasma is charged and needs to be contained with magnets because it'll melt anything it touches.

To use the magnets uniformly on a donut shaped cloud of particles will cause the particles drift and hit the wall because the donut has particles traveling short distences close to the donut hole and long on the rim. The particle will eventually drift into the wall and destroy the reactor.

So fuck it, squash the donut and twist it around and now all of parts of a cross section traveling around the donut are traveling equally long distance.

tag yourself i'm the homogenized breeding blanket

Ions don't move along field lines they want to spiral around them that's why. The shape of the magnetic containment field is actually quite simple: Take a donut, squish it a bit, cut it open, twist one end a couple of times and glue it up again. Five times in this case, seems to be a popular choice. It's the coils generating that field where the geometry gets Lovecraftian.

This is the Proxima Fusion stuff, they're planning on running the first surplus energy reactor early 30s and commercialise in that decade, the whole thing is designed for mass production with economics (build cost vs. maintenance vs. electricity price etc) in mind from the get-go. And yes they'll pull it off it's a spinoff of the Max Planck institute, not some garage tinkerers or VC fund techbros.

I thought stellarators were older than tokamaks.

Very interesting