Word: plasma
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...fine comic effect two G.I.s in top hats putting on a mock duel in the Italian moonlight, and he remembers the combat medics on bouncing Jeeps who, "kneeling and balancing and clinging miraculously with one arm, raised the other high, as one would a torch, holding a bottle of plasma, pouring life back into a broken body. I think I have never seen a soldier kneeling thus who was not in some way shrouded with a godlike grace and who did not seem sculptured and destined for immortality...
...temperature required for a sustained reaction is, at a minimum, 50 million degrees. No conventional container could withstand such a temperature, so physicists surround the "plasma" of deuterium with a magnetic field whose lines of force are powerful enough to hold it. Then an enormous bolt of electricity is shot into the system to make the plasma particles move rapidly, thereby supplying the necessary heat...
Trouble is that when the big bolt strikes, the plasma writhes and twists, often breaks out of the magnetic field and dissipates its heat into the walls of whatever sort of outer container is being used...
Neutron Shower. In Kolb's experiment, the deuterium plasma is held in a quartz tube about a foot long. At each end the magnetic field is given added strength to form a magnetic "mirror," which reflects back the charged particles as they try to escape, thus sealing the gas in a magnetic bottle. A bank of 99 condensers, kept in the basement since condensers sometimes blow up, sends a jolt of 4,000,000 amperes thundering through the coil, heating the gas up to around 20 million degrees. Dr. Kolb reported that his machine had confined plasma and kept...
Significance of last week's experiment is not just that it generated a little electricity-but that a series of such plasma cells placed in a large nuclear reactor could produce power in major quantities...