#fusionblr

[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.

[z-arcane]

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

[literallymechanical]

I love when I post about plasma physics or fusion engineering and I get a bunch of tags like “#fusion mentioned!” or “#PhD Hell” and I check the profiles and I’m like oh ho ho, I recognize the reactor in your header.

I bet if enough CFS and PSFC and PPPL and UW Madison and TAE and T1E etc. people went around their labs mentioning each other’s shoelaces we’d get enough burnt-out early-30’s ex-homestuck veteran tumblrina PhD’s and post-acquisition reddit refugee fandom blogger ascended college interns for a decently large fusionblr cohort.

Unfortunately, we all work for direct competitors and if we say something too proprietary we get nuked from orbit, but even so. NIF's wall plug efficiency amiright?

[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!

[z-arcane]

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)

[literallymechanical]

Unfortunately the Demon Blade is ITAR-controlled, which hampers international collaboration with our partners at the Max Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik on quasi-isodynamic Demon Blade equilibria.

But have we considered novel applications of the Demon Blade to energy production technologies