Matters nothing when random disruptions happen and no one seem to understand why they happen, disruptions can cause bad performance or worse, loss of confinement completely. Calm down, Joe.Joseph Chikva wrote:You can't deny the indisputable fact that lifetime of plasma in Tokamaks has many hundred seconds order. Despite to macro and also micro instabilities which are in existance in ANY plasma device. Simply TOKAMAK allow controlling instabilities at this level.Robthebob wrote:If he doesnt care about microinstabilities, then I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.
I still dont get it, for someone as well informed as you, how are you still not acknowledging two huge problems with toks, and they are (toks have the same problem for at least the last 10 years, so almost everyone in the field knows about this, so you ought to know about them, too) inner core material and plasma instability, both macro and micro.
Again, I'm not saying toks cant last into the minutes, I'm sure they can, so can stellerators, but I'm saying it doesnt matter how long you toks can last, if instabilities happen, then what? You can have all the same parameters and have instabilities happen sometimes and not other times. The instability in part of the very design of toks, the plasma current, and I think fluid flow, but I can be wrong, chrismb talked about it a while back.
Oh yeah, the whole too much radiation and it cooks the inner walls so some of the wall material will get into the plasma and instantly soak up tons of energy (this has to do with dusty plasma, there's a reason for doing this type of research), is not a good thing either. In fact the whole, there's no known material that can withstand a burning plasma is a huge problem too.
You know what kind of machine doesnt have any of these instabilities? Stellerators. Why isnt ITER a stellerator machine? By your standard, stellerators, being a steady state machine, are designed to confine longer and have less problems. All your nice H-mode can also be achieved in stellerators too...
Tok guys are way disillusioned, I'm not saying we're not, but before calling someone ugly, look in the mirror for a change.