David Kirtley

And that inner conductor is not a piece of metal anymore.

It's one of these high temperature gases, this plasma, this charged particles.

So now you have current electrical current flowing in the plasma.

This is really, really interesting.

We talked about these charges moving back and forth.

Well, moving electrical charges is current.

So in every plasma condition we've talked about, the tokamak, the theta pinch, the stellarator, there's electrical current flowing in the plasma.

But in the field reverse configuration, you have a lot of electrical current flowing in the plasma, massive amounts of it.

And that's the key.

So you have the center core where electrical current is flowing in this transformer, if you want to think about it, primary and secondary.

And here's the craziest part of it.

This electrical current, how did I describe a magnet?

An electromagnet is a loop that has electrical current flowing in it that generates a magnetic field.

And for a theta pinch, and for a mirror, and for a tokamak, in that magnetic field, the plasma gets trapped.

But in an FRC, this electrical current is the plasma.

And that plasma then generates its own magnetic field.

And it's then trapped on its own magnetic field.

And that's the key.

And so in your tokamak, in your donut, and in your funky donut, your stellarator, you make the magnets and you trap your plasma in it.

In an FRC, you make the plasma, which makes the magnets.