Wow, I have experience welding and am trying to imagine this happening to the table I used. Sounds like that could have been a lot worse.

I don't really know much about this sort of thing short of seeing a huge generator on a field trip to a dam in sixth grade. The stator spins around the rotor which contains magnets, and these magnets have to be constant, permanent ones. Is that correct? I assume it's not viable to use electromagnets for this purpose since they use electricity. I bet it would be nice to be able to turn them off.