Today at the Tokamak

This is a new segment called Today at the Tokamak.

Let me start by explaining that a tokamak is a magical magnetic doughnut that's designed to hold a plasma that's hotter than the sun. It's not actually magic, though, it's science. Take that, Harry Potter.

I care about tokamaks because when plasmas get really hot, as in the sun, a wonderful thing called nuclear fusion can happen. Now, you might be terrified about anything nuclear because of things like nuclear weapons and melt downs of nuclear FISSION plants. Now, let me tell you that we couldn't turn a tokamak into a weapon even if we wanted to. Meltdown = impossible. It just doesn't work that way. It also doesn't produce long lived radioactive waste. So it's safe, and it's clean, and it's a way of producing energy.

The reason we don't get all our energy from fusion already (actually, we do, because sunlight comes from fusion and sunlight is what grew the plants that now have turned into oil and coal and whatnot) is because we haven't figured out quite the best way of keeping these plasmas bottled up yet. You see, the plasma hates being confined within the fancy magnetic cage we've built for it, and it's very crafty when it comes to getting out. There are all kinds of funny instabilities and leaks that let enough of the plasma out of containment that it touches the wall and cools down.

It's not actually dangerous that the plasma breaches confinement because it's not very dense. It doesn't carry enough energy to seriously damage anything, but if it does get out, it won't be under the heat and pressure we need in order for it to fuse and produce energy.

So anyway, today I wrote some code for part of a simulation and reviewed the drawings and schedules I made before the break. Today I was writing in IDL, but I also use C sometimes. The drawings are in SolidWorks, so they're actually full 3D models. I'm also modeling a lens assembly with Zemax.