Comment by pfdietz
7 years ago
Lidsky's argument is entirely unaffected by that advance. The power of his argument is that one can just ignore the plasma physics.
7 years ago
Lidsky's argument is entirely unaffected by that advance. The power of his argument is that one can just ignore the plasma physics.
Plasma physics tells us the relationship between the minimum workable size and the containment field strength. Change the field strength and the size changes.
Yes, and Lidsky's argument works even if one assumes arbitrarily good plasma performance. He was not basing his argument on magnetic field strength or beta limits, or even any particular device geometry. Assume 100T magnetic fields and beta=1; his argument still applies.
What may be confusing you is that very low power density designs, like ITER, may be even worse than Lidsky's bound. So they could be improved somewhat by better magnets or plasma physics tricks. But once Lidsky's bound is reached, further improvements of that sort are no help.