bsod’s braindumps

What’s got particle physics have to do with fusion reactors?

First of all: I havn’t blogged in a while, because I’m kinda busy starting up in a new job, as .net web developer. Anyway, I still have plenty of time to chat and read, and came across some interesting books about fusion reactors.

Fusion reactors are pretty awesome beasts. And it all comes down to what they do, they work with plasma.

Now to get an idea what a plasma is, let’s consider a nucleair collider, such as CERN in Switzerland, SLAC in the U.S.A., or Desy in Germany. What they all do is accelerate a beam of specific particles and than smash these beams of particles into something or onto eachother, *at a very specific point* in the reactor chamber. That reaction chamber is a sphere. at the center is where the nuclear reaction takes place, and because the particles go so fast, that center of the reaction chamber is typically becomes a *plasma*, and out of that plasma radiate huge amounts of particles, that are registered and measured by the apparatus in the detection sphere of the reactor chamber.

When the input particle beam of the collider is turned off, the plasma instantly disappears.

On the other hand, in a fusion reactor, this particle plasma is self-contained and stable. This time, we dont have particle detectors around it, because we’re not really interested in them particles, we just want these particles to remain in the plasma. So around the plasma in a fusion reactor is a *HUGE* magnetic field, that keeps the particles inside the plasma. Neutral particles that get created inside the plasma don’t stay in the magnetic field and hit the ractor wall with huge speeds, so the reactor wall must be able to deal with that for extended periods of time.

So what they’re doing in CERN, a huge magnetic ring with fast particles inside it, only at *one point* being a plasma, imagine a CERN where the whole ring is a plasma. That’s what they are building in France.

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2nd edit: Some have pointed out many differences between fusion reactors and particle beams, and that real particle colliders use cylindrical detectors. And in particle accelerators the energy is so high that you can create a QCD plasma, which is a plasma of quarks. You dont need that kind of energy in a fusion reactor.