Re:Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
by phkahler on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:59AM
(#18450820)
>> edit: someone down the page mentioned that containment is the issue.
Right, and that was my understanding. It's easy to accelerate a particle or a stream of them to high energy. It's another thing entirely to contain a gas/plasma at those energies. The distinction becomes more obvious when they flip back and forth between impressive sounding temperatures and simple KeV measures.
I don't know much about fusion, but my guess is the 10keV is impressive because it is a self-sustaining fusion reaction rather than being impressive because of the absolute energy of the reaction?
edit: someone down the page mentioned that containment is the issue. In a CRT you are just accelerating an electron across a few thousand volt potential and slamming it into the screen.