David Kirtley

In our systems, we have

hundreds of mega amps of current.

If you think about at your house, you have your breaker box with 200 amps or maybe a 400 amp breaker box.

And we run 100 million amps of electrical current.

So massive amounts of electrical current to be able to do this.

So that magnetic field that's generated inside that magnetic coil has some really special properties.

And we take advantage of those properties to do fusion.

And some of those properties are not intuitive.

So here's one of my favorites.

When you have an electromagnetic field, you have this coil with electricity going around it, and you have a magnetic field inside of it.

And then you have a test particle, a charged particle, an electron or an ion, which is, if you imagine, to generate this, I have a coil with electrons moving around it.

But if I put one in the middle of it, in this magnetic field, some really interesting things happen.

That

electron or that ion, that charged particle, is what's called magnetized.

And what magnetized means is that it's trapped on that field line.

In fact, even really more interesting is that it oscillates around that field line.

And so the way I think about this is if you think about the Earth's magnetosphere again, and you think about the charged particles, the aurora, the northern lights, is a charged particle trapped in the Earth's magnetic field going around.

the Earth's magnetic field.

And in the same way in fusion, we do the same thing here on Earth, but in a smaller direction where we trap these particles on magnetic fields.

And they can go around and stay a trap to that magnetic field line.