When Newton’s laws can’t help nuclear fusion
Engineers use elaborate magnetic confinement systems to prevent the leakage of alpha particles from the reactors. For instance, a stellarator uses external coils that generate magnetic fields to confine plasma and high-energy particles. Such confinement is also referred to as a ‘magnetic bottle’. However, these are holes in the magnetic bottle that allow the alpha particles to escape.
Luckily, some models help estimate where these holes can occur. Using Newton’s Laws of Motion, scientists can precisely predict where the holes occur. Still, such computations take an enormous amount of time.
If the approach is used in designing the stellarator, the simulation would need hundreds of thousands of slightly different designs and tweaks of magnetic coil layouts to eliminate the holes. This would further increase the computation requirement, making it unfeasible to attempt.