
Permanent magnets could be a solution for delivering fusion energy - abbeyj
https://phys.org/news/2020-03-permanent-magnets-stronger-refrigerator-solution.html
======
qchris
During undergrad, I worked with permanent magnets in a plasma physics
laboratory, mostly using them to build instrumentation to accelerate gas
plasma plumes for spectrographic analysis. This sounds neat in principle, but
I'm skeptical of any meaningful application. Dealing with permanent magnets of
any meaningful size (let alone arrays of them the size of which would be
required) becomes extremely dangerous, and requires a lot of care and
attention to detail. Especially considering some of the progress in lowering
the cost of high-temperature superconducting magnets, this might be a tough
sell. I'm curious if there are any statistics for accident rates of magnets
vs. cryogens like liquid nitrogen in development environments.

