Thursday, May 26, 2011

How ITER works

It is useful to study how all the fusion techniques work. The same is true for the most conventional of all the methods, ITER.   It is my understanding that ITER is Latin for "the way".  It is definitely "the way" to spend a lot of money.  It has not be "the way" to produce energy yet.  The future will decide whether it is the only way.

My impression of ITER is that it is a brute force method of obtaining results.  It is big and it uses tremendous amounts of energy and matter.  It attempts to duplicate, as does all fusion techniques, the processes that produce fusion in the stars.  But "the way" to duplicate the processes can differ, as ITER differs from the stars.  ITER uses magnetism to control the plasma.  Stars use gravity.  Both require tremendous amounts of heat to produce the energy in order for fusion to take place.

Note:  The link had to be provided because embedding is not allowed for this video.  It was uploaded by "MaxPlanckSociety" just about a year ago.

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