Dennis Whyte

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1,833 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2023 last heard Jan 2023

Dennis Whyte’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · 21 Jan 2023 podcast

Yeah, so the geometry is typically what you do is you want to produce a magnetic field that loops back on itself.

And the reason for this goes down to the nature of the force that I described.

which is that there's no containment or force along the direction of the magnetic field.

So here's a magnetic field.

In fact, what it's more technically or more graphically what it's doing is that when the plasma is here, here's plasma particles here, here's a magnetic field.

What it does is it forces all those, because of this Lorentz force, it makes all of those charged particles execute circular orbits around the magnetic field.

Mm-hmm.

And they go around like this, but they stream freely along the magnetic field line.

So this is why the nature of the containment is that if you can get that circle smaller and smaller, it stays further away from earth temperature materials.

That's why the confinement gets better.

But the problem is, is that because it free streams along.

So we just have a long straight magnetic field.

Okay.

It'll just keep leaking out the ends like really fast.

So you get rid of the ends.

So you basically loop it back around, right?

So what these look like are typically donut-shaped or more technically toroidal-shaped, but donut-shaped things where this collection of magnetic fields loops back on itself.

And it also, for reasons which are more complicated to explain, basically it also twists slowly around in this direction as well too.

So that's what it looks like.

That's what the plasma looks like because that's what the fuel looks like.

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