A Star in a Bottle

Toroidal field: made by the coils wrapped around the vessel.
Poloidal field: mostly made by a current of millions of amperes induced in the plasma, which acts as the secondary winding of a transformer.
Helical field: the sum of the two.

What nuclear fusion is and why making it work on Earth is so hard: E = mc², the binding-energy curve, the Coulomb barrier and quantum tunnelling, the Lawson criterion, tokamaks and stellarators, laser ignition at NIF, the private race, tritium breeding and a fair comparison with fission.

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