[exo-cortex]

Hi! this is fantastic article! Years ago I was able to visit the "Wendelstein 7X" stelarator-type fusion reactor in greifswald (Germany) when it was still assembled. It was so cool.

Do you think this approach of controlling plasmas also translates to these types of reactors?

Reading your article I didn't understand a lot of things and wondered if there was some kind of fusion-reactor-physics word-list where the most important keywords are explained a little. (without reading a whole book on plasma physics :-))

Also the timescales are fascinating. How long is 200ms in a tokamak? How long does this reactor need to ignite or shut down the plasma?

[ali_m]

I think one of the challenges with stellarators is that they are harder to simulate due to the twisted geometry of the chamber (with a tokamak you can often simulate a single 2D slice of the torus).

[willis936]

All optimized stellarator designs are periodic, so only one period (with correct boundary mapping) needs to be simulated. But yeah, it's a much larger search space.

[exo-cortex]

that makes a lot of sense.