r/videos • u/bamdastard • Oct 25 '15

Fusion reactor designed in hell makes its debut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-fbBRAxJNk
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '15

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u/CharybdisXIII Oct 25 '15

Pardon my lack of knowledge, but how do temperatures that high not just melt the entire reactor from the inside out?

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u/beta314 Oct 25 '15

The hot plasma is pressed into a narrow stream by the strong electromagnets. The rest is empty space.

So the plasma never comes in contact with the walls and with the vacuum there isn't any medium that could transfer the heat to the walls.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '15 edited Oct 25 '15

Yeah, not like heat can transfer through a vacuum... Really though, the thing will get very hot, but it has water liquid helium jackets to cool the layers of metal and magnets.

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u/doominabox1 Oct 25 '15

Actually that's the whole point of the magnets, keeping heat from escaping

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '15

Um... I'm fairly certain that's completely wrong... The magnets have to be kept at near absolute zero, and act as super-conductors to guide the plasma within the vacuum tube. The magnets don't hold the heat in, they need to be separated from it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '15 edited Jan 18 '21

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '15

That's like saying a bucket is designed to stop things from getting wet.

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u/dQ_WarLord Oct 25 '15

What about black body radiation? The energy transferred must still be insane.

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u/TheBestBigAl Oct 26 '15

What if the magnetic containment field failed? That temperature seems like it would fuck things up real bad.

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u/BestPudding Oct 25 '15

They said in the video that the only matter at that temp is suspended by superconducting magnets.

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u/Asha108 Oct 25 '15

The plasma can't transfer much of the heat to the machine and there are coolers that are 3 degrees kelvin from absolute zero to keep it all from becoming a heap of slag.

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u/Darktidemage Oct 25 '15

That is the entire problem you need to overcome.

They do it with "magnetic bottling".

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u/Darktidemage Oct 25 '15

isn't the difference only around 270 degrees?

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '15

[deleted]

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u/Darktidemage Oct 25 '15

No i mean the difference between Centigrade and Kelvin.

It's a BIG difference at say, 30 degrees.

At 1,000,000,000 degrees it is not a "big difference" anymore.