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Problem is, Craig, when you try and experimentally model a high energy process on an enormous scale in a lab, when you scale down the size of the process, the energy requirements for generating that process on a smaller scale go up because you're trying to model a process whose energy densities must increase on the smaller scale in order to faithfully duplicate what it seen on the larger scale. Trying to duplicate a cosmological scale Birkeland current in a lab would be impossible using today's technology. They have a hard enough time trying to duplicate the Birkeland currents in Earth's aurorae without resorting to enormous machinery. Generating some small scale experiment with a few hundred watts of electrical power and seeing some weak current being generated is not producing a scaled down version of what's present in real life. Because the interactions between current generated and it's surrounding are only very, very approximately modeling what is occurring on the larger scale, and in actual fact will miss a lot of the interactions because the small experiment just doesn't reach the energy density/current thresholds of the naturally occurring processes.
To account for what is seen on cosmological scales with high energy density electrical currents in plasmas, on the smaller scale they would have to increase the energy density per unit volume/size of the experiment that there wouldn't be enough power generated anywhere to accomplish it. Even the Z machine at the Sandia Labs would'nt have enough power, nor could it sustain that power/energy density for long enough. I think it generated about 10-15 MA (Mega Amperes) and 290 TW (terawatts) of output for 70-100 nanoseconds at its top!!. It would have to sustain several orders of magnitude greater flux capacity and overall wattage than that on a pretty much permanent basis for it to even come close to modeling even the Earth's magnetosphere and electrical potential. Let alone something on a cosmological scale.
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