He did say there are other practical limits to how small it can be though. You have to stuff other stuff inside the coils and the plasma has to be physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls, and it just gets hard to squeeze everything in there. But I wonder for example if SPARC could be made in to a system that could operate continuously, even though ARC makes more sense from a power generation perspective.
> physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls
This distance could probably be shrunk if some of the gains from matsi for meta-materials translated into fluids engineering, where some kind of "meta" fluid has certain differential properties at a given thermal load (im imagining that the side/region with the thermal load, the particles in the fluid would have some type of glassy dynamics behavior to spontaneously create a radiant barrier back toward the source, would need to talk more with my friend about this since his thesis covered quasi-1d models of glassy dynamics and spontaneous partial arrangements under various conditions on initial perturbation and at steady state).
