What if fusion needs pressure first

[Robert Zwilling]

Is it possible that we can create high temperature plasma streams that won't go the next step of fusion?

The amount of released energy has been steadily increasing but it is still less than the total amount of energy being put into the process.

Current fusion efforts are starting out with a high temperature to trigger the fusion. In the stars, the pressure comes first, which creates the high temperature. Does raising the temperature in the plasma streams create the pressure found in stars. In stars, it looks like the pressure is expanding outward from the center to the exterior. In the artificial fusion experiments the pressure seems to be exerted from the outside to the inside.

Fusion is achieved by exploding an atom bomb to achieve the pressure and temperature which then produces the required environment for fusion. There is a lot going on in that scenario and a lot going inside stars. The artificial process is very clean with a minimum of processes.

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

I was just thinking about this due to a thread on another forum. An experimental reactor in China has reached temperatures nearly 10 times that of the centre of the Sun, which I presume they did to compensate for the fact that our feeble terrestrial electromagnetic bottles cannot even begin to compare to the pressure exerted by gravity within a star. The site of greatest pressure within a star is presumably right in the centre, which I don't think is the case in a tokomak.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

The Chinese run was extremely hot and ran for 17 minutes. That's a record. But no sustained fusion by itself. That's a long time not to fire up. It could be seen as a large car rolling downhill, engine off and ignition switched on but the engine isn't starting. If the fusion did start up by itself I wonder if it would stay under control.