#fusionblr

[archacovercosine]

wake up honey, another fusion scheme just dropped: magnetic confinement, but in space!

Launch YC: Zephyr Fusion: In-orbit fusion power | Y Combinator

Powering tomorrow's industrial revolution in space

linking the ycombinator (lol) page because their website has even less information

basically, the thinking seems to be confinement time ~ major radius^2, and in space we can use a floating dipole magnet and make the field as big as we want.

notable questions to answer include

- how are you going to capture the power

- where is the power going to even go

- what reaction are they aiming for? this thing has no blanket or anything so sustaining a tritium cycle is definitely not possible.

- isn't all your fuel just going to diffuse out into space

[literallymechanical]

Tokamaks and stellarators as fusion reactors

Another comparison of the two most promising varieties of fusion reactor, tokamaks and stellarators. I used to work on tokamaks and now I'm doing stellarators and let me tell you. It's been an adjustment.

[contrabandtoxicant]

Management finally taking a hard stance on vaporising the first years.

[literallymechanical]

Running across your fusionblr post while hanging out on tumblr on my degenerate fandom account was... disorienting. I didn't even know there was a fusionblr. There are literally dozens of us I guess. Not coming off anon but I'm giving it like 90% odds we've at least met.

(Referencing this post)

The fusion community is pretty spread out, but strongly interconnected. Based on your other anon, even if I haven't met you, I'm at most, like, two degrees of separation away (I don't work at the lab you think I do anymore! I used to, a couple of years ago.).

Anyway, even though I'm still pretty early in my career, I've gotten to see the differences in design philosophies between a few different labs up-close. Like, MIT people are all-in on RF, they've got ICRH and LHCD on lock. Princeton people love neutral-beam injection, and aren't quite so gung-ho about putting RF antennas right up against the plasma. Half the DIII-D people I've met kind of want to be in defense instead. It's neat!

[contrabandtoxicant]

so what i'm learning is that we don't really get why we enter H-mode, it's more complicated that solely fluid shear supressing turbulent eddies (which is definitely a component). there's some weird 'zonal flow' shit going on and 'self organised criticality'. AND on top of that, we don't have a coherent model for ELMs. There's the peeling-ballooning model, but it's largely not characterised enough to give us any kind of certainty if we were to design a plant. much to do! and what is even the deal with RMPs!?

[contrabandtoxicant]

Ooooh girl you really cause an outward radial shift of my magnetic flux surfaces in toroidal geometries

(left: shaped magnetic flux surfaces including shafronov shift - right: without)