How did the Koreans and others manage to contain something for 48 seconds that’s X hotter than the sun? I appreciate this is in a ‘tokamak’ but how can any electronics or controls survive this inside the reactor at those temperatures?
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The gasses involved are IONIZED, and having an electric charge means the reactor can manipulate the gasses with a magnetic field. So the “hotter than the sun” stuff never touches anything, it’s floating in a magnetic field.
The answer is that we don’t really touch them. A tokamak takes plasma and confines it in a ring-like shape through the use of magnetic fields. As for the rest of the chamber it is a vacuum, through which conduction and convection methods of transferring heat do not work.
You can think of this like holding the extremely hot plasma in a container made of force fields. Electronics and controls are not exposed to the plasma directly so they don’t need to worry about withstanding such temperatures.
The main reason is that the “hotter than the sun” part is a plasma that’s magnetically confined in the middle of the Tokamak chamber, not touching anything. If the plasma does touch anything, it actually drops in temperature making the reactor less efficient/not functional, so there’s a whole bunch of engineering into not letting that break down.
Also, there are no controls or electronics IN the chamber. Any sensors are mounted passively, meaning they have a protected wire coming off of them to the control electronics that are at a safe distance.
People are talking to you about how the gases are ionized, but I’d also mention:
Temperature DOES NOT EQUAL Energy.
A lit match (temperature 700 degrees), by itself, can hurt you a little. But you’ll be fine. There’s a tiny amount of material in a match. It gets very hot (the particles it emits move very fast) but it’s small (there’s not many particles).
A liter of boiling water (temperature 100 degrees) can seriously injure you. It can transfer a huge amount of energy to your body. Yes, each individual water molecule has less energy than the stuff in the match, but there’s a lot of them, and they will give, and give, and give…
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Could you put your hand safely inside a modern Tokomak? Are the energies we’re talking about that low that the plasma would be like welding sparks against your palm? No idea. There have been some famous examples of people getting seriously injured by particle accelerators (but surviving), but I don’t know how dangerous a Tokomak is, relative to a particle accelerator, a kettle, or a match.
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