Adam Q. Kuang is a 🏷️#physicist and lead author of "Divertor heat flux challenge and mitigation in SPARC" (2020), written while he was at the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The paper states the hardest engineering consequence of building a 📝tokamak small and strong.

Compactness concentrates everything, exhaust included. Kuang's team projected 📝SPARC's unmitigated peak parallel heat flux at the 📝divertor above 10 gigawatts per square meter — close to an order of magnitude beyond anything demonstrated — with 📝edge localized mode energy fluences of roughly 11 to 34 megajoules per square meter, comparable to 📝ITER's. The mitigation turns SPARC's limitation into an advantage: because its pulses are short, around 25 seconds with a 10-second 📝flattop, the strike point can be swept across the target at roughly 1 hertz, spreading the load over a large area and keeping tile temperatures tolerable without active divertor cooling — a scheme unavailable to long-pulse machines. These are empirical-scaling projections, and the paper is explicit that SPARC will test the limits of those scalings rather than confirm them in advance.