David Kirtley: belief

Transcript context

…That’s fascinating. And that’s the key. And so in your tokamak, in your donut, in your funky donut, your stellarator— you make the magnets and you trap your plasma in it. In an FRC, you make the plasma which makes the magnets, and it traps itself. And the craziest part of this, in my mind, is that we actually see this in nature all the time. If you look at the sun, we see solar flares. And in a solar flare, we’ve all seen the pictures of the photosphere of the sun and this large arc of plasma coming out. That plasma has electrical current flowing in it, and then we see this solar flare rip off of the sun. And that solar flare then can flow throughout and continue into the solar system, and for a little while anyway, it makes something called a plasmoid. That plasmoid is, in fact, electrical current flowing in the plasma, generating a magnetic field and holding it for longer than it would otherwise. And so we’ve observed these for 100 years, and we’ve known about these plasmoids for a long time, and there are researchers that have tried intentionally to make them. But fundamentally, that’s what we do every day: we make one of these self-organized closed-field plasmas. In a more controlled way at this rapid rate of one-millionth of a second, and being able to make sure it’s reliable, stable, and all that kind of stuff. So, by the way, how do you keep the thing stable?…

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