What is magnetic confinement?

How do you control something ten-times hotter than the core of the sun? Let’s start with fusion fuels. We superheat our two fuels until they become a plasma. Plasma is charged, which means it can be moved with magnets. So we take our container – the tokamak – and wrap it in strong electromagnets to push and pull the plasma.

By combining magnetic fields, we can minimise instabilities and mould it into the optimum shape to release fusion energy. Magnetic confinement is considered the oldest, most established approach to fusion, but it’s not the only one.

Inertial confinement uses lasers or compressed pellets to release energy from its fuels. This uses and produces an on-off pulse of energy as opposed to magnetic confinement, which is continuous.

There are also stellarators which can create plasmas like tokamaks but in a twisted donut shape.

Ultimately the learnings from all approaches could help us get closer to fusion energy on the grid.

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