>>11732038During the 90s, the theoretical foundations of a method to stabilize the Z-pinch were thought up at the University of Washington. Instead of trying to squeeze the plasma with external magnets, which presents all kinds of extra difficulties with rapidly adjusting your field to deal with the insanely fast instabilities in the plasma, you would fight against a scaling instability with a scaling counter-instability-a sheared flow,one that was slower closer to the plasma and faster further away. As any given instability starts to arise in the plasma and pushes its way out,it encounters more and more resistance that pushes it back, mitigating the plasma-breaking instabilities that make normal Z-pinch plasma so ephemeral.
Now that certainly makes intuitive sense-but it remained an untested postulate for some time. But that has changed.
Even as we speak this concept is being explored by an ARPA-E funded team of WU physicists, and has already demonstrated a 5000-fold increase in the lifetime of Z-pinchs and ion energies in excess of 1 kev.
This is a linear fusion reactor that uses no superconducting magnets, and can be efficiently adapted to aerospace applications, especially if facilities are made to use D-D fusion to produce helium-3 fuel to allow for fusion engines that produce less neutron radiation and require much smaller amounts of shielding.
Fusion rockets could be in use within 20 years.
