Containment Field: Difference between revisions

== Real Life ==

* Modern particle accelerators are actually capable of concentrating destructive amounts of energy in their beams. A failure of the magnetic fields which steer the beam is a very real eventuality, and accelerator designers implement complex machine protection systems that rapidly react to those events in order to avoid damage to the expensive equipment. Simulations show that one beam from the European LHC, at full power, could punch through '''''forty meters of solid copper.'''''<ref>based on a 86-microsecond exposure</ref> Similarly, the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (or RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab in New York contains redundant magnetic containment for its high-energy ion beams; it also needs gigantic thicknesses of solid marble and heavy metal (lead, iron etc) to 'catch' the beam safely when it's dumped out of the accelerator ring. Both RHIC and the LHC also employ complex electronic and mechanical systems that essentially act as a mechanical 'containment field', a la ''[[Babylon 5]]''

* Fusion occurs at such high temperatures that to contain the (generally isotopes of) hydrogen that is undergoing fusion you use a magnetic field to keep that superheated fuel away from the walls of the reactor. Fusion reactors have been built and have been run but the energy required to create, sustain, and contain the reaction has so far been greater than the energy it has been possible to generate.

** Even smaller devices like fusors found in many colleges, which usually can not produce net energy, require a massive amount of shielding. In these cases, it's less a matter of the released plasma or superheated fuel being an issue, though, as it is a concern about releasing hard X-rays and fast neutrons bouncing around should the lead glass break.