Some people speculate that the Russians “gave” us tokamaks, to make sure that we never achieved practical fusion!
HAH! I agree!
I've mentioned it before, but after the Soviets released all the info on tokamaks and the West started on them, the Soviets all but stopped tokamak research and moved on to Galateas.
Never hear of a Galatea? Ain't that a surprise! Still, that doesn't appear to work either!
kunkmiester wrote:Lining up the spin in a BFR would be statistics, wouldn't it? You'd do some studies to see how the spin survives as it runs through, and you'd tweak your injector to give the spins most likely to get the most particles lined up properly.
I could be way off on this, but my understanding for setting up spin is that you create a magnetic field which sets an axis, then you have two RF emitters 90 degrees out of phase with each other in a plane perpendicular to the magnetic field and emitting at a resonance frequency (larmor precession rate) which depends on the strength of the field and the nucleus you are trying to effect.
Magic happens, photons get absorbed, and some percentage of the nucleons become spin aligned. The percentage can be measured by how much of the RF power is absorbed by the ions.
MDs use NMR all the time. My current confusion is how conservation of angular momentum is maintained. Since when do photons have angular momentum? I guess they must, or the hard drive on our computers would also stop working.