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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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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