This is a fun idea! I was recently poking at field line reconnection myself, in conversation with Claude.
I don’t think the energy balance turns out in the idea’s favor. Here are the heuristics I considered:
The first thing I note is what happens during reconnection: a bunch of the magnetic energy turns into kinetic and thermal energy. The part you plan to harvest is just the electric field part. Even in otherwise ideal circumstances, that’s a substantial loss.
The second thing I note is that in a fusion reactor, the magnetic field is already being generated by the device, via electromagnets. This makes the process look like putting current into a magnetic field, then to break the magnetic field in order to get less current back out (because of the first note).
The third thing I note is that reconnection is about the reconfiguration of the magnetic field lines. I’m highly confident that electric fields when the lines break define how the lines reconnect, so if you induct all the energy out the reconnection will look different than would have. Mostly this would cash out as a weaker magnetic field than it would be otherwise, driving more recharging of the magnetic field, making the balance worse.
All of that being said, Claude and ChatGPT both respond well to sanity checking. You can say directly something like: “Sanity check: is this consistent with thermodynamics?”
I also think that ChatGPT misleadingly treated the magnetic fields and electric fields as being separate because it was using an ideal MHD model, where this is common due to the simplifications the model makes. In my experience at least Claude catches a lot of confusion and oversights by asking specifically about the differences between the physics and the model.
This is a fun idea! I was recently poking at field line reconnection myself, in conversation with Claude.
I don’t think the energy balance turns out in the idea’s favor. Here are the heuristics I considered:
The first thing I note is what happens during reconnection: a bunch of the magnetic energy turns into kinetic and thermal energy. The part you plan to harvest is just the electric field part. Even in otherwise ideal circumstances, that’s a substantial loss.
The second thing I note is that in a fusion reactor, the magnetic field is already being generated by the device, via electromagnets. This makes the process look like putting current into a magnetic field, then to break the magnetic field in order to get less current back out (because of the first note).
The third thing I note is that reconnection is about the reconfiguration of the magnetic field lines. I’m highly confident that electric fields when the lines break define how the lines reconnect, so if you induct all the energy out the reconnection will look different than would have. Mostly this would cash out as a weaker magnetic field than it would be otherwise, driving more recharging of the magnetic field, making the balance worse.
All of that being said, Claude and ChatGPT both respond well to sanity checking. You can say directly something like: “Sanity check: is this consistent with thermodynamics?”
I also think that ChatGPT misleadingly treated the magnetic fields and electric fields as being separate because it was using an ideal MHD model, where this is common due to the simplifications the model makes. In my experience at least Claude catches a lot of confusion and oversights by asking specifically about the differences between the physics and the model.