David Kirtley: prediction

Transcript context

…Yes. And so that is in the fusion field, the name of the game. Folks will have inertial fusion, with a nanosecond tau. Very short, but then very high pressure. They don’t have magnetic fields, but very high pressure. And then in stellarators and tokamaks, your goal is very long tau, but you’ll have much lower density, and you can’t really go too much in temperature, but they’ll have much lower density. And so where we live in the pulsed magnetic or the magneto-inertial fusion is in the middle, in extremely high magnetic fields, increasing pressure as much as you can, and then keeping them around long enough. And so that gets to the tau. That gets to that energy confinement lifetime, and also, it gets to stability. And so this is the thing that this field-reversed configuration has shown that we can build. These plasmas can last for hundreds or thousands of times the basic theory has shown that now you can have long enough lifetimes. So what that means is in a practical fusion system, there are lifetimes of these high beta pulse systems between 100 microseconds and a few milliseconds, thousandths of a second. And you hold onto it for a few thousandths of a second. You do fusion, and then you exhaust it. And so the whole process in this is we start with a magnetic field that fills the full chamber. You then inject fusion fuel. You ionize it. Superheating it now to a nice, cold one million degrees. But hot enough that you have charged particles. You have plasmas. You can then start increasing the magnetic field. You form a field-reversed configuration, and then rapidly increase the magnetic field further. Increasing from one to five to 10, 20, to even higher magnetic fields. And as you do that, the plasma heats. You compress it, increasing the field and pressure. Fusion is now happening. New charged particles are being born inside this system with a tremendous amount of heat and energy, but in charged particles. And this is where the beta really works to your advantage, is that just like magnetic pressure on the outside, magnetic pressure, NKT, compresses the fuel, increasing pressure and temperature. When the pressure and temperature of the plasma increase, NKT increases. It pushes back on the magnetic field, increasing the magnetic field on the outside of the plasma, and what that does is magnetic field is electromagnetic current, and current running in a wire. And what that does is push current back in the wire. And so the plasma itself now pushes back on the magnetic field, pushing electrical current out of the system and recharging the capacitors where we started this whole process. All in a self-organizing way. So I think it’s good to clarify how fusion usually generates energy, where this intermediate step of heating up water, then the steam is the thing that leads to electricity. And then, of course, the FRC method that you use leads directly to electricity. I was wondering if you could describe the difference between those two.…

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