Reactor Charge And Discharging

Ashfield fusion reactors have a relatively small form factor making them easily fixed into starships to power fusion torches for propulsion, and easily packed into cargo compartments on colony ships headed for distant frontiers. While the reactor produces next to no radiation with very little energy waste, the reactor's design does produce an inordinate amount of electrical static energy that needs to be discharged about every 500 hours of operation. All that is required to discharge the core safely is close proximity to a magnetic field. Smaller ships such as frigates and freighters make use of this while landing on a planet, in fact it has become an SOP for most landing facilities to discharge the core as part of the docking process. Larger ships make use of the magnetic fields of gas giants to discharge their cores as they cannot land on planets.
The stronger the magnetic field, the less time it takes to discharge the core. A fully charged core on a terrestrial world could take anywhere from one to two days to completely discharge, but ships discharging into a gas giant could be done in as quickly as a few hours. In theory ships in deep space could discharge their cores through black body radiation, but doing so would take weeks to complete; possibly longer.
Under emergency circumstances, the core could be manually discharged all at once into the starship's hull. Doing so would fry most of the higher-level electronics on the ship and could potentially cause severe damage to critical systems such as life support and maybe even breach the reactor itself, but doing so could theoretically discharge the core in a matter of seconds. It would also create unpredictable distortions in spacetime around the ship's hull making spike drills dangerous to impossible for several hours after the discharge.