How does the Tokamak work?

In article , Cyril Meynier
wrote:

le Thu, 28 Aug 2003 02:58:31 GMT, Charles Cagle a
pensé, ce qui, en soi, l'a déjà classé dans une petite élite. Pour
être plus précis, il/elle a pensé que :

In reality it doesn't work. Or rather it works quite well as a device
used to extract money from taxpayers so as to keep an army of welfare
queens in white coats employed so that they can send their kids to
college without ever really having provided anything of value for this
nation.

One could say exactly the same about wind power 30 years ago, about
railways in 1820, rocketry in 1950, nuclear (fission) power in 1960,
computers in 1940, and so on.

Absolute nonsense response. Wind power has been used for a thousand
years or more, railways were working in 1820. In 1804, the first
steam locomotive, run on rail, was constructed by Richard Trevithick.
It was used at Pennydarren Iron Works. Then in*1808 Trevithick
constructs a locomotive that can travel about 12 mph. * V-1 and V-2
rockets were killing thousands of Britons in the 1940's, and in
December of 1957, Pennsylvania's Shippingport nuclear reactor became
the first commercial power plant to generate electricity.

So, besides being wrong with respect to the history of certain
technologies you have just dishonestly attempted to conflate working
technologies with a technology that has never worked. No one has ever
built a working nuclear fusion reactor which generates sufficient
energy to even reach breakeven (where the energy put in is equal to the
energy that emerges). It doesn't work now, it hasn't worked in the
past and it isn't going to work in the future using any scheme of
thermonuclear fusion. Even the so-called 'thermonuclear' weapons are
not 'thermonuclear' in the sense that the particles undergo fusion as a
function of their collisional temperature. The basic theories of
nuclear fusion are completely wrong and the most primitive axiom of the
relative motion of quantum particles coupled with Maxwell's equations
prove this without any doubt or error at all.

One of the saddest thing of all in modern science was that Teller's
technical innovations worked to produce a successful fusion weapon but
his ideas about how they work were wrong. This is the world's greatest
example of serenditpitous luck. Fusion weapons work but they don't
work like the designers think they work. They never have. The problem
is that it is nearly impossible to argue with such a level of success.
Who the hell isn't going to believe that your theory is correct if the
weapon you built works? There are historical parallels. The Chinese
had gunpowder for a thousand years and brought its manufacture and
technological usage to a high art but a modern chemist would laugh
aloud at the Chinese gunpowder guildmaster's explanation of how it all
works. We're talking about the fact that physicists have had the
explanation of elementary charged particle interactions wrong. That
doesn't stop them from building really useful technological devices but
that doesn't mean that they actually understand the nature of charge
nor what electrons are. It isn't required to build working technology.
But when you get to the level of building a device that relies upon the
energy yield of nuclear fusion reactions where you want to carefully
control and fine tune the rate of energy output then you have to know
what is going on at the quantum level. Did you know there's a viable
model of how a fusion weapon works which is different from the
explanation believed by the weapon designers themselves? I'm sure it
never occurred to you that such a thing could be possible. And I'm
sure that you would even be unable to listen to the facts about these
matters. There's such comfort in numbers because if you're all wrong,
well, hell, you can still fade away into the anonymity provided by such
a huge crowd of other people who also don't know what the hell they're
talking about.

Charles Cagle