© Charles Chandler

 

Several people have stated that the "natural tokamak" construct has to be flawed, as tokamak experiments have proved that it is not possible to get net power output from fusion due to magnetic confinement.

 

While that is true, it's an apples-and-oranges comparison. Who said anything about "net power output"? This isn't nuclear engineering — it's astrophysics. And we're not accelerating plasma with magnetic fields — we're condensing the angular momentum of a solar system, or galaxy, or even the entire Universe. So we have plenty of energy — a bit more than the typical physics lab — and we're just trying to account for energy conversions that don't make sense any other way. A natural tokamak, overloaded with condensed angular momentum, very definitely has the properties that we're trying to explain.

 

So we might not be able to explain power plants running on fusion reactors, because such doesn't seem possible at this point, but that doesn't mean we can't explain some of the more energetic processes in astrophysics with nuclear fusion.