Splitting the hair
"Already corrected"
True, the Z Machine and NIF are both inertial confinement reactors, but still different designs - one uses laser light pulses (NIF) and the other pulses of electricity (Z Machine) to achieve fusion conditions. They are also both pulsed designs, in that these conditions can only be maintained for very brief periods of time (on the order of a few hundred nanoseconds), whereas Tokamak and Stellarator designs can sustain fusion (at least in theory) for days, weeks or even months at a time. Ultimately though, they are all four the same kind of thing - at least to a topologist looking at it from some distance ;) I mean they all use some aspect(s) of the electromagnetic force to heat up and compress lighter elements in order to fuse them into heavier elements, releasing large amounts of energy in the process. My reason for posting my initial remark, and attempting to make a distinction between the different types of reactors being developed was purely to to point out that the German experiment (W7-X), being a very different beast to EAST, is at least as interesting as the Chinese one, and that the "That's cute, Germany" twist was dishonest and unfair. I freely admit that the exact wording I used was less than clear, and that it is possible to slice the cake in other ways - but the point remains the same; there are basically four different types of fusion reactors being developed, and the Chinese and German machines are not of the same type. The physics may be similar (well, duh), but the engineering challenges, physical nature and operational characteristics of each machine are _enormously_ different. In my quest to find four simple words to describe these differences I settled on electrical, magnetic, laser and inertial. I apologise if this was too simplistic, or even misleading - but they are still different designs and that was the point I was trying to make.
How Wikipedia describes the Z Machine:
"Since its refurbishment in October 1996 it has been used primarily as an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research facility."
And NIF:
"The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is a large laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
