SCIENCE SPIN-OFFS

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"If you shape your field in a clever way then you can make it so that the drifts basically cancel out, at least for those that would leave the plasma," says Proll.

Theoretically, that is. In practice, well, we're still working on it. To give a magnetic field precisely the right shape requires extensive calculation at many different scales, and all of it must happen in a 3D space.

So, computer code that simulates the plasma over the entire volume of a stellarator had to be developed, and that had to wait for computers that were powerful enough to perform the calculations. "These machines, these supercomputers of the '80s, made it possible to crank through the equations, to solve the equations simultaneously, and then it was found out, okay, the stellarator needs optimization," says Klinger.

https://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/06/stellarator-fusion-power/