Can Flame Jets Effectively Constrain Plasma in Fusion Reactors?

[Andrewtv848]

TL;DR

New type of active confinement

I have a idea for a plasma based fusion reactor. Using a combusting hydrogen/other reactant generate a flame jet to actively confine the plasma and possibly using a helium compressed jet stream as well to bring down turbulence.
My friend already says these will destroy the plasma but I am am not sure.
thanks for your time

 

[Keith_McClary]

The temperatures inside the ITER Tokamak must reach 150 million degrees Celsius—or ten times the temperature at the core of the Sun—in order for the gas in the vacuum chamber to reach the plasma state and for the fusion reaction to occur. The hot plasma must then be sustained at these extreme temperatures in a controlled way in order to extract energy.
This is much hotter than you can get by combustion.
Only a few grams of fuel are present in the plasma at any given moment.

 

[Astronuc]

Summary:: New type of active confinement

hydrogen/other reactant

Generally, any ion of Z>1, He, Li, . . . increases the energy losses from the plasma, in addition to having lower cross-sections (probability) for fusion reactions. In addition, as Z increases, there are a corresponding numbers of electrons which also contribute to the plasma pressure, without any benefit with respect to fusion.

 

[mfb]

Plasma pressure is of the order of 10⁵ Pa. A good rocket engine can shoot out material at an optimistic ~5 km/s. For each square meter you need 10⁵ Pa*1m²/(5 km/s) = 20 kg/s of material. ITER has a few hundred square meter surface area. Let's say 500 for simplicity. Then your jets shoot 10 tonnes of material into the plasma per second. The material is essentially at zero temperature compared to the plasma temperature. Heating 10 tonnes per second to 100 million K requires a power of a few petawatt - millions of gigawatts (for less than a gigawatt of electricity). At the given pressure you can only support maybe a few grams of material, so your system breaks down after a microsecond - time for the jets to move just a few millimeters. The system never reaches any sort of stable operation. The numbers just don't work out at all.