David Kirtley

In fusion, the physics we're using is actually quite old.

That the fundamental electromagnetic physics is 1800s physics.

The fundamental atomic physics is early 1900s.

And so the fundamental physics of how these work is very well understood.

Putting them all together into a power plant, that's hard.

And so you can do the math.

You can do the math.

Every introductory grad student does the math on a stellarator and say, this is all I need to do.

I just need to make a magnetic coil in this very complicated shape.

And then fusion will happen.

However, doing that in practice is actually quite challenging.

The tokamak and the stellarator are both magnetic systems.

Their goal is to generate this magnetic field and hold on to the fusion fuel long enough.

Like I mentioned, these charged particles are trapped on the magnetic field.

In fact, they're oscillating.

We call that a gyro orbit as the radius that they oscillate around this magnetic field.

Um,

And we've been talking about atomic physics where everything is at this nanoscale.

But gyro orbits are not.

Gyro orbits for these fusion particles are measured in inches.